Noah Cicero - Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products.

She saw a man wearing a cowboy hat. It was true. Nevitsky had not lied. There he was, the CIA agent.

The CIA agent had been in the CIA since his early twenties. He went to college at Yale and got his master’s there. He knew three languages: English, Spanish and Arabic. He had worked many twelve to fifteen hour days for the agency. At the beginning it felt like a beautiful dream come true. He was a CIA agent, something unique and special and awesome in American society. It was tantamount to being a movie star or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. But instead of having fame or money he had secrets and the ability to wiretap people and sneak around the planet doing whatever he liked. He got to work in Iraq, Egypt, Peru and Colombia. He had lived his childhood dream of being a CIA agent, of seeing the world, of protecting his country. But one day he became bored with it. He didn’t know why he was protecting America. The depression got worse and he didn’t even know why he made a sandwich to eat it. Most of the time he would vomit the food he ate. He would eat a bowl of soup and vomit it up ten minutes later. He would get food from McDonald’s and vomit. He decided to buy organic food from Whole Foods but he was still vomiting. He couldn’t keep any sort of food down. He bought an I.V. and started running nutrients through a tube into his veins. He was in his mid-forties and had never married or had children. He had a big house but no one lived in it but him. He couldn’t even get a cat because he spent so little time at home. He started to think, sometimes before he went to sleep, that the cause of his depression was all the traveling. He had gazed upon the pyramids of Egypt, upon Saint Sofia in Istanbul, upon the castle ruins of Europe, the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem, and he even made it to the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. He would look at those structures and be amazed by their beauty and how they were once built by great empires, full of vigor and strength. He imagined himself to not only be CIA but one of David’s Mighty Men, a Janissary, a Samurai, a Praetorian Guard or a Persian Immortal. Sometimes the CIA agent would think, “Who were these people, these Janissaries? Weren’t they just deluded men who defended their leaders blindly, without reason, just because they thought it was their duty, no other reason?” He started to wonder if he had any reason to defend the government, the free world, he started to wonder what the phrase ‘free world’ even meant. He started to question language and when one starts questioning language, everything they know becomes corrupt. He started to feel like America was just another predictable empire. They got their chance after the Second World War to become an empire and took it. They didn’t even question it. They built a giant military, created the CIA, and they were off, never looking back. But what was the point of becoming an empire? To create peace, to protect your self-interests, to bring your ideology to the world whether the world wanted it or not? He felt predictable, even trite, that he was part of a government and culture that got sucked into the empire trap so easily. He realized this while sitting at a table drinking tea in Cairo. He went to work every day and said nothing about his feelings. He didn’t know what to do with his life. He didn’t know how to do anything else but be a CIA agent. What else could he do? Go work for a local police department and be bored out of his mind. He’d had offers to go into various lines of business, but that all seemed boring too. He decided to put his skills to a different use: espionage of his own government.

Monica walked over to the table and touched the seat and said, “May I sit?”

The man with the cowboy hat said, “Yeah, go ahead.”

Monica looked at him. He was in his mid-forties, handsome, wore a nice long-sleeved, button-down shirt, blue jeans and cowboy boots. In her life she had never had a conversation with a CIA agent or with a man wearing a cowboy hat. It all made her nervous, the cornfield, the sad-looking people, the CIA agent. None of it made any sense to her. It all seemed absurd, but she wanted to find Michael and would do what was required of her.

The man said, “You are Monica Whitten. I have read your documents. You’re a state university grad in computer science, you got above average grades. You grew up middle-class. You have lived basically a normal life. Is this true?”

“Yes, but who are you?”

“That isn’t important.”

“But why are you helping me?”

“I am helping because there was another committee and I disagreed with what they said, a committee just like the one Dr. Charles Nevitsky was part of, but this committee was different. Its goal wasn’t to make America strong or to defeat the Soviets. The CIA did not invite great minds from all over America to participate. The committee was a bunch of stooge politicians and corporate assholes. The question was: how does America compete in the twenty-first century in a global economy with so much cheap labor in other countries? Their answer was that America needed a large amount of unemployed people which would lead to everyone’s value being cheapened. We had to turn America into the third world to compete. Many protested and said there were real problems, global warming, the fact that the wealthy are buying up everything. No one cared. I have determined that no one cares, but I care. And I do not care where it leads us as long as someone does show some concern. So I will help you.”

Monica didn’t understand any of this. Why would her government join up with corporations to make life worse? Why would anyone want to make life worse? Monica’s main problem with the situation was that she had grown up around people who believed that people strived to make their own lives better while at the same time showing a great deal of concern for the lives of others. Her father worked not only to make sure they got what they wanted but also to make sure she got what she wanted. She remembered times when her father would help his brother out with money. She remembered how her dad would shovel the older people’s driveways in the neighborhood. She remembered how on holidays they would go to church and feed the poor. She remembered simple things like canned food drives she had done at high school. She thought about Michael and how he lived with his grandpa, helping the old man with daily chores he could no longer do. She recalled Hurricane Katrina and how she donated money to it and how she helped raise money for the people of Haiti when the earthquake happened. Monica’s world was a world where people helped each other, where people shared and tried their best not to be selfish. The idea of people intentionally being selfish scared her. It confused her. She just didn’t understand why a human would want to be selfish.

The man in the cowboy hat said, “I will help you find Michael.” He pulled out a laptop and put it on the table. He showed her a satellite map. He pointed at a small little dot in the map and said, “This is Nevada. You need to go here.” He pointed with his index finger and said, “This is where the camp is, fifty miles off any known highway. There is a dirt road that goes to it but you can’t use that one, because you will be spotted. You need to park your car here and walk.” He pointed at a little gas station, then he said, “Leave the keys in your car. Someone will pick it up.”

Monica responded, “But that’s my car.”

“You won’t need your car after that. Listen, what you know is over. Your old life is over. You will need to walk through the desert for two days. This will be very hard, but I will supply you with all you need. After you find the camp, you need to find Sherwood Burke.” The man made the screen focus on the camp. He pointed with his index at a part of the fence and said, “At three in the morning Sherwood Burke will be standing at this point in the fence. You will give him the materials I will give you, then he will tell you what will happen.”