A Tale Tail Heart tale no.4

Raff was always as the French would call it, a “manquer.” It translates to a person who just misses in everything he does. He almost wins the gold, he almost makes a million dollars, he almost saves the day…almost almost. If truth be told, Raff isn’t entirely plagued by bad luck so much as self-sabotage. It has been a problem his whole life. When given the choice between the high road and the easy shot, he invariably errs on the side of unwisdom.

Such was the case when he was cornered outside of the second depot by two agents of the state just two weeks before Bogran was chased down by the military police. Raff didn’t want to think about what had happened to him if they'd caught him, but deep inside he knew it would be horrific and that his frenemy would suffer, and yet... He did what he had always done. He gave in to the path of least resistance, and besides. He was tired. He knew the other shoe was going to drop. It wasn’t if~ but when; that was the question.

Freyja told him that they would never be more than friends. Love, she was honest, wasn’t possible with a locket installed, so why lie about it. She had patted his shoulder and told him that his crush on her would pass in time. But the thing was, Raff had a locket and still felt passion. At least he thought that is what it was he felt for Freyja. He supposed it could be testosterone, but he dismissed that thought.

The thing was, she didn’t even try to see him as a man and without her, his life wasn’t worth much. The problem with Raff is that he had trouble seeing things from another’s perspective. He had a hard time understanding that for one person, love meant the commitment to a child, for example. To another, perhaps love for country. Still to someone else, love for an idea or a song, or even an equation was enough to carry them through the day.

But the agents of the state knew he was the weakest link so that they knew who to target when the time came to break up this pocket of rebellion that had been circulating seditious materials throughout the state and even further. The last flyer they had produced had been found in New Georgia in the home of a former police officer for the old peach state, and another man was arrested and hanged in New Texas for trying to reproduce it. His wife and children were cuffed to a column and forced to watch as his bladder and his bowels emptied and the capillaries popped in his eyes. The New Yamnayans wanted to make sure that others appreciated the severity of sedition, and the only way to do that was by example.

After intercepting each player’s phone activity during the surveillance period, the only member of the group constantly discontented in one text after another was Raff. He had things to say about Bogran, who he was clearly jealous of. Bogran wasn’t a “manquer.” He had finished his Master’s degree at Georgetown, and his Ph.D. at the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations in Tel Aviv. He spoke English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic and he could even curse well enough to make an old woman blush in Mandarin. Raff suspected that Freyja had feelings for Bogran when she called him first every time she thought that the house she shared with her daughter was being breached or scanned for heat signals from overhead.

It never occurred to him that the reason she would call Bogran was that he knew how to deal with unfriendlies. Raff had no real experience with surveillance or neutralization and had done no time in the sandbox at all. In fact, Freyja and Bogran met in Iraq when they were both employed by Black Nile, a mercenary recruit service who paid you an absolute fuck-load to take your life into your hands for a few weeks at a time, usually someplace unpleasant, but not always. If you were ex-military, they were the perfect employer. It beat the shit out of working the register at the Piggly-Wiggly or worse, working the copier at Office On-The-Go. That is where Raff was working when the US government fell and when his employer's doors shut, he was dragged underground after he failed the Sentry recruit exam. This was his dirty little secret, and it was a good thing the others didn’t know that about him. He was good at printing, and it was nice to finally have friends. This thought made him frown.

The agents of the state cornered Raff outside of the coffee shop he frequented two Saturdays ago while he was texting his mother on the corner where the signal was still strong. Told him that his application to the guard had been reconsidered, but there was the small matter of his current situation, and the only way forward past this lapse in judgement was for him to go to work for them, quietly of course. The thought of going legit was too much for Raff to resist. He would be a man in uniform at last, and someone mother would be proud of. Mother was very discerning. She did not approve of his work for the underground and she made it abundantly clear that she thought that his printing stories about pipe dreams and fantasies was akin to smoking weed in her basement and playing video games, which is how he had spent time when he dropped out of college. “Going against the times was just getting stuck in the past,” she’d quote. That was one of the Neo-Yamnayian slogans that she liked when they first got into office.

Yes, Mother would be proud. She had never approved of him, not since the second grade when he was caught cheating on a spelling test. It was as if her love had dried up and turned off like a faucet tap as they left the principal’s office, and this was such a long time ago. So long to be without affection. Mother had to be very strict with Raff, and he understood this. In fact, it was when he had tried her patience that her punishments were a relief. After all, she wouldn’t bother if she didn’t actually love him, he told himself. When he wanted to come home after failing out in college she had changed the locks, but after a night of weeping on the porch she let him back into the house, and for a second or two, her melting resolve had made him feel whole. He had to promise to get a job, though.

Raff told the agents that he thought that the others would suspect him if he started taking pictures of them while they worked. The agents told him that they had a solution and then gave him a whole network of hidden cameras. All that he had to do was place them. They would do the rest, and so he did. He really liked their smart uniforms. This was his way into the upper echelons from the underground and finally, he could sleep at night knowing that he wasn’t on the shortlist of people to arrest. It felt good.

The first images started coming through to headquarters; the first unsub in the frame was no longer unknown, according to facial recognition software. It was a Freyja J. Nichols, a single mother. According to her heart locket, she lived near the New Pa border with her daughter, Delphine. The screen indicated that the father had been terminated for crimes against the state perpetrated by the subject herself. A journalist now, she largely remained off-grid, and no photographs of her on street cams existed. Her plates were registered to someone dead, but then she was ex-military. No surprise but it was a small matter to disconnect her locket so the order was sent to Central.

One down.

The next set of images contained a known individual named Bogran Abulafia. He was a piece of work, that much they concluded when the system finally identified him, since his entire file was redacted. Why bother reading page after page of word soup divided by more pages of blackened in text. What a boring blog, an intern muttered.

Suffice it to say, Bogran was about to meet his maker. The thing is, they could not locate a serial number for his heart locket. He had to have had one, but where was the code? That question was answered by a phone call to Central. The Neo-Yamnayans wanted to keep tabs on a man with his skills, in case they ever needed to employ him. His locket ID was kept in a separate data bank. Finding out he dealt in sedition, this precluded his employment so the locket number was given over, however Central advised that they would like this Mr. Abulafia to be taken alive. That made everyone nervous. It was so much easier just to pick up a body than to have to hunt someone down, but orders were orders.

There was never any question as to what to do with the building where all of these pamphlets and magazines were published. Torching it was as easy as outfitting it in cameras. And the Snitch? Where was the code to his locket? They pulled him up on the computer but there was some confusion between him and a twin brother. Where was this twin? How odd, the IT people thought. Still, they could not be zapping a twin, could they? Rules were rules. It would have to wait until the meeting with the supervisor.

The twin in question was a brother who didn’t exist. One of the things that Bogran had done when they first started working together, was to create a chimera or a double for Raff because he was the only one without the street skills to keep him alive. So the system was hacked and they created this phantom twin to protect him. He was just a kid, they thought. It wouldn’t give him much time, but it would give him enough of a head start to evade them and it was the best they could do.

When Bogran spotted the agents flocking to the corner coffee shop and surrounding the young man earlier, he swarmed them on his motorcycle to get them off of Raff. He acted as a decoy, not thinking that he would be the one cracking his bike up on some random car door. Well, he’d escaped custody with some bother and no small effort.

Bogran would make one last trip to the second depot. He knew he'd been made and the location was no longer secure. He also knew by now that they had gotten to Freyja because his old army buddy Archangelo, a field medic in the underground, had pinged the ham radio back at the garage. It made him shake his head to think ham radio was safe from the Neo Yams, but his guts contorted when he heard that Freyja was dead. He was relieved to know that the girl was ok. It did not take long to connect the dots that formed such an unpleasant pattern when he woke up in the hospital. Raff was the leak. That slimy bastard was the reason he was very nearly gutted and Delphi was an orphan. He wasn’t sure where he would go when this was over, but right now he owed a traitor a visit.

The building was dark except for one computer screen that could be seen through the back window to the main room. He had designed the security, so turning off the beams was trivial. Off they went, quiet as cotton he crossed the room, airless as the night. Time to collect a heart locket.

He’d take it the easy way.