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Person of Interest / Honneur et Fidélitié (continued)
« Last post by KernilCrash on April 20, 2023, 12:43:37 PM »Part 7
China, 2010
Reese sat facing into the early morning sunlight, taking advantage of the peace and quiet to do some thinking. The difficulties he was attempting to resolve required a greater amount of concentration than his usual early-morning level of poorly directed mental focus.
He was stuck. He had gotten as far as he could on his own. He needed assistance from some organization, undoubtedly one that was illegal, and all of potential solutions he had managed to formulate faced the same stubborn cluster of complications.
After fleeing the uninhabited city in Ordos, his intention had been to make his way south by either car or truck as far as Wuhan. Once there, he had planned to assess the travel situation before making a decision whether to head for Shanghai or Hong Kong. None of that had come to pass. The Chinese government had been understandably upset that a foreign nation had fired a cruise missile at a structure located well within China’s borders. There was no question that dropping a missile on Ordos had not been an ‘Oops, our missile malfunctioned and strayed off course’ variety of technological error, and the government had responded with outrage. Checkpoints were thrown up, roads closed, cities locked down while the military hunted for anyone that might be associated with the unprovoked attack, and foreigners were detained by the thousands. Anyone without an iron clad reason for being in the country and impeccable credentials became a suspect.
To say that it made travel difficult might have been the understatement of the century.
Reese had been forced to head in the wrong direction, away from the coast and the larger cities where he might find the types of illegal organizations that could get him out of the country. Every time he attempted to turn south or east, patrols and checkpoints had forced him farther to the west. It barely mattered, since he hadn’t figured out how he would pay for that kind of assistance. He no longer had access to bank accounts of any sort, either personal or those funded by the CIA. He was deceased, after all. In the ultimate irony, if he wanted to go on living, John Reese had to stay dead. That meant that every bit of monetary or personal identification linked to his old life could no longer exist, including his passport. Reaching a coastal city took second place to the money and identity portion of the equation.
All of which left him facing one overriding question: How the hell was he going to get back into the United States? In the post-911 world, he could not even board an airplane destined for the US without a valid passport, let alone enter the country. Short of walking north to Russia, hanging a right at the Bering Strait and dog-paddling across to Alaska, he had not been able to come up with another way to get home.
The pressure to produce a solution had been building the entire time he had been slowly herded westward by the military cordons. Jessica had called him; she needed his help. When he told her he could be there in twenty-four hours, she had said she would wait. It had been weeks longer. He had not been able to contact her to tell her he was still coming. Every time he thought of her, the need to find a solution mounted to a level that begged for rash, immediate action that would end in disaster, such as stealing a helicopter.
He pushed that call to action back into the cage where he kept it imprisoned, and worked through the more rational options several more times. He kept coming up with the same result. He was stuck.
The quiet scuff of a footstep on concrete brought his futile musings to an end. The gray-haired man who had provided him with a refuge came out of his small ground-floor apartment, moving without hesitation.
“I’m here,” Reese said, to give him a reference point.
Mister Han traversed the distance unerringly, placed a hand on Reese’s shoulder, and sat down beside him. “Meditation?” he asked.
It had become a running joke. Mister Han was able to enter a calm, imperturbable mental state at the drop of a hat, regardless of his surroundings or distractions. Reese’s attempts to do the same thing worked in reverse; he invariably wound up more tense instead of less, with his thoughts skittering in a thousand directions. He had not yet caught the knack of how to push all of his concerns aside in order to clear his mind.
“Of a sort,” Reese said. Meditating on how to get himself and a Chinese national out of the country, perhaps. Han had been an intellectual and an outspoken dissident before he lost his vision, which had marked him as someone to be kept under surveillance. It did not matter to the government that he had been blinded. His life here consisted of an unending stream of official harassment, physical assaults, deprivation, and misery. Considering the potential repercussions if they were discovered, his decision to help Reese was a mystery. It could only make things worse for him if the government learned what he was doing.
“How is it this morning?” Han said.
“Better, as you predicted. It’s healing.”
Kara’s bullet had passed through his side front to back at an angle, managing to miss every major blood vessel and organ in the process. It defied luck and comprehension. The shot should have been fatal. His best theory was that he had begun to turn away as Kara pulled the trigger, and had shifted all the important internal organs out of the way by millimeters. That did not mean it had healed quickly and easily. For the second time in his life, he had contracted a potentially fatal abdominal infection. He had been losing ground rapidly when Mister Han took him in and began treating it with traditional Chinese medicine. Herbs, compresses, and powders had beaten it back to the point where his immune system could finish the fight without additional assistance.
Mister Han’s question and his subsequent thoughts about getting shot shifted the focus of his mental gymnastics from the future to the past. For the hundredth time, thoughts about what he needed to do gave way to those revolving around how he had gotten here.
He had been sold out. Betrayed by the people he believed he could trust. That realization had been sapping him of interest in survival ever since Kara’s bullet tore through his body. He was ambivalent about Kara’s role in the treachery. She had always followed orders with a blind, unthinking fanaticism. She had done what she was ordered to do, as always. No more and no less. He had not been able to get mad at her for that. Not yet. Mark Snow, on the other hand, had known exactly what he was doing, and had implemented it with exquisite treachery. Mark, he would be happy to shoot without any additional provocation if they ever crossed paths again.
Reese had never liked the job he was expected to do for the Agency, but he had believed in the overall purpose behind their missions. His belief that they were striving for something beneficial may have faltered occasionally; it had never failed. Up until this mission, he considered the things he had done a form of self-sacrifice. He had put aside his own psychological well-being in pursuit of a greater good for all Americans. The goal had been to make his country a better, safer place to live. That was an honorable thing to do, even if the methodology was repugnant.
There was no honor in what had happened in Ordos. No honesty, no loyalty, no unit cohesion. At the last moment, he had drawn back from the brink of betraying everything he had been fighting for. Kara had not.
Han’s voice broke into the darkness that never failed to envelope him whenever he revisited those events. “You are quieter than usual this morning, John. Even for you, this is unusual.”
Reese turned his face up toward the sun, closed his eyes, and focused on the warmth soaking into his body. It took a while to come up with some way to respond to Han’s observation. There were many things he did not want to talk about, few that would not lead back in that direction. He tried something safe.
“Do you believe in honor, Mister Han?”
Han gave him a little nudge with his elbow. “I believe the question you really wish to ask is whether you believe in honor. Or perhaps it should be whether you still believe in honor,” he said, putting emphasis on the word ‘still’.
“You see too much,” Reese said.
The comment pleased the blind man. He chuckled. The smile remained in place, sucking any offense out of his next question. “Well, do you, John?”
“I don’t know whether I ever knew what it was.”
“If you are worried that you have lost your belief in its existence, then you know what it is.”
“I don’t know what half of your remedies are, but if one falls off the shelf, I know it’s missing.”
“Hardly the same thing.”
Reese wasn’t so sure. His intended purpose had gone so far astray, he had begun to question whether he had known what he was attempting to fight for and against in the first place.
“Tea,” Han said. It was his solution for all problems. Rain or shine, illness, poverty, moral dissolution, death, or overflowing bounty, his recommendation never varied. In Mister Han’s opinion, every circumstance would benefit from the internal application of a specific remedy. He went inside to heat some water.
Honor. Reese continued to roll the concept around inside his head, testing to see if he knew what the word represented. And fidelity to one’s comrades, something Mark Snow would never understand. There had been a time when a path had opened up before him that had promised a life-long application of those principals in both directions, bestowing and receiving. Who would he be now if he had chosen that direction? Someone better maybe. A small ache came to life in his heart, generated by a desire to go back in time and make a different decision.
Honor and fidelity. The words bounced around an echo chamber deep inside his head, sounding each time they connected with the walls and went soaring in a new direction, sending out a message in the chiming reverberations. The sounds began to shift with each repetition, altering the syllables without changing the meaning. They shifted into French.
Honneur et Fidélitié.
The motto of an organization that could be trusted to keep its promise.
The answer hit him with a near physical impact.
Reese dug into his pocket and pulled out a cheap disposable cellphone that he had purchased his second day on the run, before merchants like the sidewalk cellphone vendor had been closed down by the government search. He no longer had the white plastic card. He had memorized the number years ago, drumming it into long term storage through repetition until it resided beside the two other numbers that were impossible to forget. He would go to his grave able to recite three phone numbers without error or hesitation: the phone number for the house where he had spent his childhood, Jessica’s cellphone, and the one he was about to call.
He punched in the number and hit the green button. It was answered after two rings.
“Nom,” a voice said.
“Daffyd Crockett.” He spelled it out.
“Avez-vous besoin de l’anglais?” Do you require English?
“Non.” He had learned to speak French during the intervening years, albeit with an Algerian accent that would make any self-respecting Frenchman cringe and request that he use a different language.
“Attendez.” Wait.
A computer keyboard clattered in the background. Reese waited with a mixture of curiosity, apprehension, and excitement squirming behind his breastbone. The colonel had said anywhere, anytime. Part of him wanted to take the colonel at his word; a larger portion of his being was wondering if ‘anywhere’ included China. As far as he could see, the only way it could be worse was if he had gotten himself trapped in North Korea.
After a lifetime of waiting, which was probably closer to six seconds, the voice returned. “Quelle est votre situation?” What is your situation?
Reese explained where he was located and what he needed. He was told to stay on the line. It might take as much as thirty minutes, the voice informed him. He was not to hang up. If they got disconnected, call back without delay, same number. If it was busy, add a one to the final digit in the phone number and try again.
The directives for maintaining contact made it easy to wait patiently. Also, the man on the other end had not said, “China? Are you out of your fucking mind?” which he took as a positive sign. Reese sat in the strengthening sunshine, occasionally shifted the small phone from one ear to the other to keep his hands from cramping, and listened to the silence coming from a military facility located somewhere in France.
The voice returned. “Restez où vous êtes. Deux jours. Quelqu-un viendra. Vous comprenez?” Stay where you are. Two days. Someone will come. Do you understand?
“Oui, je comprends.”
It seemed that as far as the Foreign Legion was concerned, getting a stranded ex-CIA operative and a persecuted dissident out of China and into the United States was no big deal. Or if it was, it did not matter to them.
Honneur et Fidélitié. Such a thing still existed.
He went inside to tell Mister Han that he would need to pack a bag.
Final Note: The physical description of the white card is fiction. The existence of the card, the telephone number, and the promise that goes with it, is not.
From an interview with General Norman Schwarzkopf (Ret.), who was made a member of the Foreign Legion in recognition of his role in Operation Desert Storm: “They gave me a card with a telephone number on it. They said, ‘If you are anywhere in the world, and you get in trouble, call this number and we will come to your aid.’”
China, 2010
Reese sat facing into the early morning sunlight, taking advantage of the peace and quiet to do some thinking. The difficulties he was attempting to resolve required a greater amount of concentration than his usual early-morning level of poorly directed mental focus.
He was stuck. He had gotten as far as he could on his own. He needed assistance from some organization, undoubtedly one that was illegal, and all of potential solutions he had managed to formulate faced the same stubborn cluster of complications.
After fleeing the uninhabited city in Ordos, his intention had been to make his way south by either car or truck as far as Wuhan. Once there, he had planned to assess the travel situation before making a decision whether to head for Shanghai or Hong Kong. None of that had come to pass. The Chinese government had been understandably upset that a foreign nation had fired a cruise missile at a structure located well within China’s borders. There was no question that dropping a missile on Ordos had not been an ‘Oops, our missile malfunctioned and strayed off course’ variety of technological error, and the government had responded with outrage. Checkpoints were thrown up, roads closed, cities locked down while the military hunted for anyone that might be associated with the unprovoked attack, and foreigners were detained by the thousands. Anyone without an iron clad reason for being in the country and impeccable credentials became a suspect.
To say that it made travel difficult might have been the understatement of the century.
Reese had been forced to head in the wrong direction, away from the coast and the larger cities where he might find the types of illegal organizations that could get him out of the country. Every time he attempted to turn south or east, patrols and checkpoints had forced him farther to the west. It barely mattered, since he hadn’t figured out how he would pay for that kind of assistance. He no longer had access to bank accounts of any sort, either personal or those funded by the CIA. He was deceased, after all. In the ultimate irony, if he wanted to go on living, John Reese had to stay dead. That meant that every bit of monetary or personal identification linked to his old life could no longer exist, including his passport. Reaching a coastal city took second place to the money and identity portion of the equation.
All of which left him facing one overriding question: How the hell was he going to get back into the United States? In the post-911 world, he could not even board an airplane destined for the US without a valid passport, let alone enter the country. Short of walking north to Russia, hanging a right at the Bering Strait and dog-paddling across to Alaska, he had not been able to come up with another way to get home.
The pressure to produce a solution had been building the entire time he had been slowly herded westward by the military cordons. Jessica had called him; she needed his help. When he told her he could be there in twenty-four hours, she had said she would wait. It had been weeks longer. He had not been able to contact her to tell her he was still coming. Every time he thought of her, the need to find a solution mounted to a level that begged for rash, immediate action that would end in disaster, such as stealing a helicopter.
He pushed that call to action back into the cage where he kept it imprisoned, and worked through the more rational options several more times. He kept coming up with the same result. He was stuck.
The quiet scuff of a footstep on concrete brought his futile musings to an end. The gray-haired man who had provided him with a refuge came out of his small ground-floor apartment, moving without hesitation.
“I’m here,” Reese said, to give him a reference point.
Mister Han traversed the distance unerringly, placed a hand on Reese’s shoulder, and sat down beside him. “Meditation?” he asked.
It had become a running joke. Mister Han was able to enter a calm, imperturbable mental state at the drop of a hat, regardless of his surroundings or distractions. Reese’s attempts to do the same thing worked in reverse; he invariably wound up more tense instead of less, with his thoughts skittering in a thousand directions. He had not yet caught the knack of how to push all of his concerns aside in order to clear his mind.
“Of a sort,” Reese said. Meditating on how to get himself and a Chinese national out of the country, perhaps. Han had been an intellectual and an outspoken dissident before he lost his vision, which had marked him as someone to be kept under surveillance. It did not matter to the government that he had been blinded. His life here consisted of an unending stream of official harassment, physical assaults, deprivation, and misery. Considering the potential repercussions if they were discovered, his decision to help Reese was a mystery. It could only make things worse for him if the government learned what he was doing.
“How is it this morning?” Han said.
“Better, as you predicted. It’s healing.”
Kara’s bullet had passed through his side front to back at an angle, managing to miss every major blood vessel and organ in the process. It defied luck and comprehension. The shot should have been fatal. His best theory was that he had begun to turn away as Kara pulled the trigger, and had shifted all the important internal organs out of the way by millimeters. That did not mean it had healed quickly and easily. For the second time in his life, he had contracted a potentially fatal abdominal infection. He had been losing ground rapidly when Mister Han took him in and began treating it with traditional Chinese medicine. Herbs, compresses, and powders had beaten it back to the point where his immune system could finish the fight without additional assistance.
Mister Han’s question and his subsequent thoughts about getting shot shifted the focus of his mental gymnastics from the future to the past. For the hundredth time, thoughts about what he needed to do gave way to those revolving around how he had gotten here.
He had been sold out. Betrayed by the people he believed he could trust. That realization had been sapping him of interest in survival ever since Kara’s bullet tore through his body. He was ambivalent about Kara’s role in the treachery. She had always followed orders with a blind, unthinking fanaticism. She had done what she was ordered to do, as always. No more and no less. He had not been able to get mad at her for that. Not yet. Mark Snow, on the other hand, had known exactly what he was doing, and had implemented it with exquisite treachery. Mark, he would be happy to shoot without any additional provocation if they ever crossed paths again.
Reese had never liked the job he was expected to do for the Agency, but he had believed in the overall purpose behind their missions. His belief that they were striving for something beneficial may have faltered occasionally; it had never failed. Up until this mission, he considered the things he had done a form of self-sacrifice. He had put aside his own psychological well-being in pursuit of a greater good for all Americans. The goal had been to make his country a better, safer place to live. That was an honorable thing to do, even if the methodology was repugnant.
There was no honor in what had happened in Ordos. No honesty, no loyalty, no unit cohesion. At the last moment, he had drawn back from the brink of betraying everything he had been fighting for. Kara had not.
Han’s voice broke into the darkness that never failed to envelope him whenever he revisited those events. “You are quieter than usual this morning, John. Even for you, this is unusual.”
Reese turned his face up toward the sun, closed his eyes, and focused on the warmth soaking into his body. It took a while to come up with some way to respond to Han’s observation. There were many things he did not want to talk about, few that would not lead back in that direction. He tried something safe.
“Do you believe in honor, Mister Han?”
Han gave him a little nudge with his elbow. “I believe the question you really wish to ask is whether you believe in honor. Or perhaps it should be whether you still believe in honor,” he said, putting emphasis on the word ‘still’.
“You see too much,” Reese said.
The comment pleased the blind man. He chuckled. The smile remained in place, sucking any offense out of his next question. “Well, do you, John?”
“I don’t know whether I ever knew what it was.”
“If you are worried that you have lost your belief in its existence, then you know what it is.”
“I don’t know what half of your remedies are, but if one falls off the shelf, I know it’s missing.”
“Hardly the same thing.”
Reese wasn’t so sure. His intended purpose had gone so far astray, he had begun to question whether he had known what he was attempting to fight for and against in the first place.
“Tea,” Han said. It was his solution for all problems. Rain or shine, illness, poverty, moral dissolution, death, or overflowing bounty, his recommendation never varied. In Mister Han’s opinion, every circumstance would benefit from the internal application of a specific remedy. He went inside to heat some water.
Honor. Reese continued to roll the concept around inside his head, testing to see if he knew what the word represented. And fidelity to one’s comrades, something Mark Snow would never understand. There had been a time when a path had opened up before him that had promised a life-long application of those principals in both directions, bestowing and receiving. Who would he be now if he had chosen that direction? Someone better maybe. A small ache came to life in his heart, generated by a desire to go back in time and make a different decision.
Honor and fidelity. The words bounced around an echo chamber deep inside his head, sounding each time they connected with the walls and went soaring in a new direction, sending out a message in the chiming reverberations. The sounds began to shift with each repetition, altering the syllables without changing the meaning. They shifted into French.
Honneur et Fidélitié.
The motto of an organization that could be trusted to keep its promise.
The answer hit him with a near physical impact.
Reese dug into his pocket and pulled out a cheap disposable cellphone that he had purchased his second day on the run, before merchants like the sidewalk cellphone vendor had been closed down by the government search. He no longer had the white plastic card. He had memorized the number years ago, drumming it into long term storage through repetition until it resided beside the two other numbers that were impossible to forget. He would go to his grave able to recite three phone numbers without error or hesitation: the phone number for the house where he had spent his childhood, Jessica’s cellphone, and the one he was about to call.
He punched in the number and hit the green button. It was answered after two rings.
“Nom,” a voice said.
“Daffyd Crockett.” He spelled it out.
“Avez-vous besoin de l’anglais?” Do you require English?
“Non.” He had learned to speak French during the intervening years, albeit with an Algerian accent that would make any self-respecting Frenchman cringe and request that he use a different language.
“Attendez.” Wait.
A computer keyboard clattered in the background. Reese waited with a mixture of curiosity, apprehension, and excitement squirming behind his breastbone. The colonel had said anywhere, anytime. Part of him wanted to take the colonel at his word; a larger portion of his being was wondering if ‘anywhere’ included China. As far as he could see, the only way it could be worse was if he had gotten himself trapped in North Korea.
After a lifetime of waiting, which was probably closer to six seconds, the voice returned. “Quelle est votre situation?” What is your situation?
Reese explained where he was located and what he needed. He was told to stay on the line. It might take as much as thirty minutes, the voice informed him. He was not to hang up. If they got disconnected, call back without delay, same number. If it was busy, add a one to the final digit in the phone number and try again.
The directives for maintaining contact made it easy to wait patiently. Also, the man on the other end had not said, “China? Are you out of your fucking mind?” which he took as a positive sign. Reese sat in the strengthening sunshine, occasionally shifted the small phone from one ear to the other to keep his hands from cramping, and listened to the silence coming from a military facility located somewhere in France.
The voice returned. “Restez où vous êtes. Deux jours. Quelqu-un viendra. Vous comprenez?” Stay where you are. Two days. Someone will come. Do you understand?
“Oui, je comprends.”
It seemed that as far as the Foreign Legion was concerned, getting a stranded ex-CIA operative and a persecuted dissident out of China and into the United States was no big deal. Or if it was, it did not matter to them.
Honneur et Fidélitié. Such a thing still existed.
He went inside to tell Mister Han that he would need to pack a bag.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
The End
The End
Final Note: The physical description of the white card is fiction. The existence of the card, the telephone number, and the promise that goes with it, is not.
From an interview with General Norman Schwarzkopf (Ret.), who was made a member of the Foreign Legion in recognition of his role in Operation Desert Storm: “They gave me a card with a telephone number on it. They said, ‘If you are anywhere in the world, and you get in trouble, call this number and we will come to your aid.’”