Page 23 of Assassin Anonymous

“They have milk powder in them, but they’re cooked. Can you have milk products that are cooked?”

The answer is usually yes but sometimes no. Whatever, I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I’ll pick up some Lactaid just in case. I pluck one out. It’s sticky and smells like a rose. I shove the whole thing in my mouth. It’s so sweet my teeth ache, but that might be trauma from earlier.

Did I get hit in the face? Maybe I got hit in the face. I don’t remember.

The city’s skyline glitters across the bay, the buildings tall and almost leaning toward us, a rainbow of colors giving off Blade Runner vibes. We’re just far enough from the rest of the crowd that we can’t be heard, but he speaks low anyway.

“You’re alive,” he says, his voice as flat and as calm as the dark water stretching out below us.

“You seem disappointed.”

He doesn’t say anything to that.

“What are these?” I ask, reaching out to take another dough ball.

“Gulab jamun,” he says. “They’re all over the place in Little India.”

“Your intel sucked,” I tell him, chewing slowly. “There were six men in the room, plus Campbell.”

He shrugs, takes out a ball, examines it closely, and takes a small bite. “Earlier in the day it was eight. There was some scuttle about an attempt on his life, so they circled up.”

The way he says it, completely unperturbed, makes me want to slap him. “You couldn’t share that?”

Ravi takes another small bite.

“So it was a test,” I tell him.

He offers me a little side-eye and a smirk. “And you passed.”

“Bullshit,” I tell him, a little too loud, then look over my shoulder to make sure no one is close enough to hear. “I could have gotten killed.”

“We thought you might die, or at least get arrested, at which point you would have been dead before you saw the inside of a cell,” Ravi says. “That was the interview. And this is the job. The stakes can be anything from a pile of money to the end of the world, and the only requirement is that you’re the best. The fact that you’re standing here tells me you’ll do just fine.”

I take two dough balls at once and shove them in my mouth. Think back to three months ago, getting pulled into a blank room at Coronado, Ravi sitting at a table, regarding me like color-coded cells on a computer screen, trying to figure what they added up to, his hand on a folder in front of him that he never opened.

He told me he worked for an organization called the Agency. I asked if he meant the CIA, and he told me, no, the CIA was peewee football and he was with the NFL. The best I can tell, it’s some deep-state shit—a clandestine group made up of various government agencies and financial and industrial leaders, all with a goal of keeping the planet spinning the right way.

“I’m impressed,” he says now, throwing away the now-empty bag in a trash bin next to him, and taking a wet wipe out of his pocket to clean his fingers while I suck mine clean. “For every seven people we recruit, one makes it. The first assignment usually isn’t so hard—generally you at least get a gun. But the fact that you went in there unarmed?” He looks me up and down again. “Impressive. Really impressive.”

He’s trying to flatter me.

As much as it annoys me, it also works. I didn’t join the SEALs thinking I’d be using my words. And what I did today, that’s not something just anyone can do.

“Why me?” I ask.

It’s the question I’d held back until now, but it feels important.

“No family, no real ties to civilian life,” Ravi says. “High test scores, glowing recommendations. You have an ear for languages. You have the right temperament. Plus the military is full of militia nuts who sleep with their AR-15s, or guys who have a pair of plastic nuts on the back of their pickup truck. You’re neither of those things. We have some other metrics, but ultimately, you were exactly what we look for.”

“And how am I supposed to trust you?” I ask.

Before Ravi can respond, the sound of delicate, haunting Chinese string instruments swells up from unseen speakers, and the water in the bay explodes into towers of mist that are filled with tendrils of neon light, shifting into shapes like flowers and mandalas. They grow larger and get closer until there’s condensation on my face. The crowd oohs and aahs.

It’s beautiful, but hard for me to appreciate.

Ravi takes off his glasses and cleans them on his polo. “You’re not supposed to trust me. You’re just supposed to help me keep the world running.”

He replaces his glasses and offers me his hand.

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