Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

on.’ Samson opens the enormous oven, where some herb bread is getting scorched. He pulls out the tray and puts it on the bench then starts hastily chopping some spring onion for a garnish.

What he deserves. ‘What did the stepfather do, again?’

‘He suffocated his kids with cotton balls. You don’t remember?’

‘Oh, I thought he might have been the guy with the tattoo,’ I say, improvising.

‘I don’t remember any tattoo.’

‘Maybe it was just a birthmark.’

‘Wait, do you mean the one who broke his girlfriend’s neck?’

‘Oh, yeah, that’s who I meant.’ Apparently Fred has made plenty of videos I haven’t seen. And it sounds like he doesn’t choose his victims at random—he takes killers. Not unlike me.

The thought is uncomfortable. I push it away.

‘You know, Donnie cut that dude’s foot off.’ Samson smiles and shakes his head, amused by Donnie’s shenanigans. ‘If I hadn’t been here to treat the stump, he wouldn’t have lasted until—Ow! Fuck!’ Samson is sucking on one of his fingers.

‘What’s up?’

‘Just cut myself. Badly. Goddamn it.’ He goes to the sink and turns on the water.

I glance over at the chopping board. He’s dropped the knife. Next to the blade, I can see a sliver of skin, pink on one side, red on the other.

‘Can you grab some paper towel?’ Samson asks.

‘Huh?’ I’m still staring at the chopping board.

‘Paper towel. It’s right behind you.’

I tear my gaze away from the thin piece of Samson’s finger. At my house the paper towel would be stuffed into a cupboard, still half-wrapped in plastic. Here, it’s mounted on a neat little rail. I tear off some sheets and hand them to Samson.

‘Thanks.’ He presses the paper against his hand and it blossoms red immediately, like the flowers I saw in the greenhouse.

‘I’ll clean up the mess.’ I turn back to the bloodied chopping board and the knife.

‘Just give it here. I’ll wash it.’

‘Okay.’ I bring them over to the sink.

Samson examines the board, frowning. ‘I think I sliced off some skin, but I don’t see it anywhere.’

‘Huh. Weird,’ I say.

His lip curls. ‘Sure hope it didn’t end up in the food.’

‘Yeah.’ I clear my throat. ‘That would be bad.’

‘Lux,’ Fred says from behind me.

It takes a second to remember that’s my name now, but I turned around as soon as I heard his voice, so he shouldn’t have detected any hesitation.

Fred has changed into cargo pants and a sweatshirt with a faded purple logo on the chest. He breathes on his hands and rubs them together.

‘Your room is ready,’ he says.

CHAPTER 4

Under my crown I’m sometimes flushed, but I can move any distance in any direction. Who am I?

An ex-CIA contractor once visited the field office to teach us about undercover work. He wasn’t popular. The FBI agents thought the CIA was full of shifty, self-important assholes who refused to follow anyone else’s rules. This contempt was envy in disguise—many of them had gone to Quantico only after flaming out at Langley.

I wasn’t supposed to be at the presentation, but I had heard there would be food, so I snuck in. The conference room smelled of yesterday morning’s coffee and Friday’s five o’clock beers. The rumour of food turned out to be false. It may have been a deliberate trick to improve the turnout. This seemed like something the CIA would do.

The contractor’s name was Hassan. He was slight and softly spoken, with a crisp grey suit, a tattoo on one side of his neck and an old knife wound on the other. He told us he had been embedded in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and he strongly hinted he had been to other places that he couldn’t talk about.

‘There are two kinds of cover,’ he told us. ‘Official and non-official. In an official cover role, you tell everyone you work for the US Government, but you pretend you’re in a less interesting organisation than the CIA. The department of transportation, or education. Or perhaps the FBI.’ No one laughed. ‘You act like a normal bureaucrat, while recruiting local assets to do the real spying for you. If you’re caught, you just get sent home. No big deal.

‘I did the other kind. Non-official cover, where no one knows you work for Uncle Sam, and you therefore have no diplomatic protection if you’re caught. Agents with non-official cover are often executed. Since you’ll be going undercover with gangbangers and mobsters, the stakes will be similar.

‘To be an effective undercover agent,’ Hassan continued, clicking through to the first slide of his PowerPoint presentation, ‘the secret is preparation. You need to be able to quickly recall every detail about all the people you’ll be embedded with. Make flash cards. Build memory palaces. You need to know your false identity inside out. Not just the biographical details, like your parents’ names and when you were supposedly born, but personality traits. How would the person I’m supposed to be walk into a room? How would he greet a stranger? How would he answer this question or that? I recommend spending a few weeks inhabiting this character before you go into the field.’

The surly FBI agents just glared at him. Their budget was pitiful. They didn’t have a few weeks to devote to anything. Half of them were supposed to be on vacation right now, and all of them would have to work twice as hard this afternoon to catch up after wasting all morning listening to him.

Undaunted, Hassan clicked through to the next slide. ‘Trust your handler and your superiors. They’ll do the actual investigating—you’re only supposed to be their eyes and ears. You can’t focus on your cover and bring your own agenda to the mission. There’s not enough room in your head.’

‘Not in your head, maybe,’ muttered Richmond. The agent next to him snickered.