Allen Zadoff: Boy Nobody

I don’t use guns, but I know all about them. At least enough to know that I’m screwed.

He motions with his head for me to turn around. Doesn’t wave the gun barrel like an inexperienced man would do.

If I turn now, I’ve lost.

I don’t think he’s going to shoot me. He’s going to take me somewhere and ask questions. That’s a lot worse than being shot.

I think of my father. The last time I saw him I was twelve years old. He was taped to a chair and bleeding. Someone had asked him questions.

Questions are bad.

That day with my father was a long time ago. Another time, another life.

Now there is a man with a gun.

Now I must look for options.

Now I must survive.

The fourth man shouts at me in Mandarin. I don’t know what he’s saying, but he’s angry. He knows what I’m trying to do. Stall. Work the angles. And with three of his colleagues down and bleeding, he’s not treating me like a sixteen-year-old anymore.

I look at the gun. I look at his eyes.

Cold.

I’m in trouble.

And then the phone rings.

The Android phone in my hand. The glass is shattered, but the phone is still working.

The ring surprises him as much as it surprises me.

Surprise is not a bad thing. Not if you can use it to your advantage.

I answer the phone.

“ Ni hao ma ?” I say. How are you? in Chinese.

That’s about all I know how to say.

I listen to the phone for a moment, then I hold it out to the fourth man as if it’s for him. He’s so shocked he doesn’t know what to do.

I shake the phone a little. I look at him like he’s an idiot. We both hear the man shouting over the phone, his voice tinny and distant.

I don’t know what he’s saying, but it doesn’t matter.

AP Bio, Subtopic 3C.

I dangle the phone in front of me.

The guy reaches—

And I hit him in the head, in the soft spot of his right temple, an inch behind his eye. I hit so hard that the phone comes apart in my hand.

He drops to the ground.

Done.

What if the phone didn’t ring? What would have happened?

Not now. I can’t think about that now.

“Chance can be your friend or your enemy,” Mother used to say. “Make it a friend.”

Mother, that’s what I call the woman who trained me.

She’d taught me this lesson, and I applied it today.

I look at the bodies of the four men on the ground around me. I look at the gun by my feet.

Mother taught me another lesson. Death is a tool I use for my work. It’s not something I do lightly. I could finish these men, but it is not strictly necessary. They are already crippled, their mission thwarted.

They do not need to die. At least not now.

Issue closed.

It’s time to use a real phone. My iPhone.

It looks like a normal phone, but it’s not. The physical architecture is the same, but the operating system is much different. And the apps? Well, they’re far from average.

I open the Weather Channel app. I click on REPORT HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS.

I hold up the phone. A map appears with a GPS dot that shows my position. It glows red, then a second later flashes green.

A cleanup crew will be here shortly.

Mother will not be happy. I might have some explaining to do.

I take the car keys from the fourth man’s pocket. I start up the sedan. It’s not like Chinese spies are going to report a stolen car.

Besides, it’s got diplomatic plates. And I like to drive fast.

I’M SPEEDING DOWN THE PIKE.

I’d never do it under normal circumstances. Nothing to draw attention to myself.

But diplomatic plates and driving like an asshole go hand in hand. Besides, I’m on the Pike, where traffic laws are optional.

I’m heading toward Boston now, putting distance between myself and the incident. The mile markers tick by, each one making me safer than the last.

I glance in my rearview, automatically scanning for tails. I open the sunroof so I can monitor the sky.

I’m alone.

I briefly think of Jack, what it’s like for him right now. In a split second he’s become a sad statistic. His father’s death will be a minor tragedy among the privileged students at Natick Prep. A young man, the unexpected loss of a parent, a period of mourning, a period of adjustment.

But I know something Jack doesn’t know:

Life goes on.

Even after the worst of tragedies, it just keeps going.

I am sixteen, but this is an old lesson to me. It helps me do what I must do.

There is something else I know:

Jack’s father was not who he seemed to be.

Jack thought of his father as the CEO of a tech firm with high-level government contracts.

That much was true.

But his father was something else, too. He was secretly working with the wrong people. After dancing with four Chinese spies this afternoon, I’m guessing it was the Chinese government.

The details are not for me to know. They are not my business.

My business is to get in, do the job, and get out again. Move on to the next.

The job is assigned to me.

I don’t have to think. I have to act.

The general picture, that’s all I need, and the true picture of Jack’s father is that he was doing something he was not supposed to be doing. Something that made him dangerous, possibly even a traitor.

That’s why I was sent here. To stop him.

It’s my specialty. I get an assignment, and I carry it out.

The Program, the organization I work for, says I am a patriot, but patriots have a choice. I do not.

Maybe that’s not true.

I had a choice a long time ago, and I made a mistake.

My father had a choice, too. He chose wrong, or I wouldn’t be here.

Back to Jack and his father. The matter at hand.

I don’t need to have an opinion about what I’ve done, but I do have a way of thinking about it that helps me.

I’ve done Jack a favor.

He doesn’t know the damage his father has already done or the damage he was yet to do if he were not stopped.

Unlike me, Jack’s cherished image of his father will be maintained forever, frozen in time. Who and what his father was will never be known. Not to him. Not to anyone.

Here’s what Jack will remember:

The beautiful lie that defined his family.

I am not lucky like Jack.

I know the truth about my family. Or some of it.

I know my father was not the great dad I thought he was, or the man he pretended to be to the world. The Program tells me one thing, but my memories tell me another.

I don’t know which to believe.

It’s enough to make all my memories suspect, to make the past a mystery from which I cannot escape.

IT WAS A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN EARLY NOVEMBER.

I was twelve years old.

I was waiting for my father in his office at the university, and I got a call. There had been an accident, and I had to come home immediately. That’s what the caller said.

I ran home to find Mike sitting at our kitchen table. I was surprised to see him there.

“Where are my parents?” I said.

There were cookies on a plate in the middle of the table. Oatmeal raisin. Mom used to put them out for us. I was skinny and hardly ate. Mike was big for his age and ate a lot.

“Your parents,” Mike said. “I need to talk to you about them.”

I noticed a can of diet ginger ale on the floor by the refrigerator. It had spilled and formed a sticky brown-yellow puddle. I was looking at it, wondering how it got there, wondering why nobody had done anything about it, when Mike reached out and touched me with something.

Something sharp, like a thumbtack.