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Originally From Chapter Four:
“Fine Print and the Pursuit of Happiness”

Salt helped one night by asking Carter about his time as an agent, which at the time was news to me.
Cater replied, “My agent back story was getting too complex. Technologically I was a wonder for our operations, but the human limitation, not in physical ability but in recognition by others, carried too many problems after prolonged exposure in the field. They even coined a new term for it, just for me, too much contextual responsibility in keeping up my identities. The mob used the net before most businesses did and my face and aliases were widely known and blown in just ten short years after the first incision.”

Just the fact that he said all that with a straight face tugged at my irony strings. Either this guy was actually an agent or he was the biggest huckster that could not snap out of his character.

I was wrong and right. Carter was no huckster. But he also could not snap out of character. And he had little choice.
For two days in September I hung out in an archival basement of computers, paper copies of classified file folders, the smell of old coffee and slick metal walls. The special but sterile library was tucked in an undisclosed location in Northern Virginia and had less than twenty official employees that were made up of guards or people paid to go down and look up things for people that weren’t trusted enough to go traipsing through a super-classified area. Being seven-stories down would rattle even me, and I usually wasn’t the least bit claustrophobic. The displaced library was rarely visited in my two days there and must have had a rule of no more than one visitor at a time, of course accompanied by two guards. This meant that nice they were done the 150,000 or so square feet of accessible storage was an empty shell that must have driven even the most stalwart sentry mad. I would normally have found it comforting had it not been designed to have the exact opposite effect.

In a special library of the CIA you can only hope to find 10% of the story. I’d like to think that I found closer to 80%, but I am willing to admit I am probably wrong.

Carter wasn’t just a spy. He was a gadget. And he wasn’t the first.

At some point between 1954 and 1971 there was an operative whose facial features were grotesquely (my editorial feeling) altered to accommodate two cylinders capable of taking and storing black and white, and later color, high-speed film. He had a few other tricks such as an inner-ear two-way radio and microphone with limited audio recording capabilities. Awkward pull-sensitive wires running down through his shirt controlled all of this. By all accounts he was slow, could not deal with bright light and needed to hide these ocular sausage tubes with headwear or oversized sunglasses. A real showstopper, he must have lasted for at least a little while because there were pages of mission reports and entire albums of blurry black and white photographs in the archive. His story abruptly ends with a small memo scrawled in blue ink, revealing that Wilson was killed on operating table repairing life-threatening injuries.

Carter’s story abruptly began with mission reports that appear in a file folder tucked just behind Wilson’s. Starting in 1989, “Carter” was a code name for an average agent who let the boys in blue tinker inside his head too. With no outright description of all he could do I pieced together this list from the first few missions he did, as observed by what I could only guess was his doctors:

“Replacement cosmetic and ceramic/plastic surgeries gave appearance of normal eyes (entirely mechanical, however with minimal use of human tissue); System ran through microchips and implant-responsive diodes on cortex; Camera was 1Mega-Pixel digital, medium-resolution images captured with smaller, albeit more powerful lenses (including limited night-vision, infrared, brightness adjustment and black-out lenses); Sensitive microphone allowed recorded audio and included two external transmitters for placement and recording from a limited distance; Data Storage included onboard computer for backup and transmission over government radio frequencies and a variety of early military cell-signal ranges (including limited modem-like behavior), infrared and land-line computer interfaces including SCSI and early but later compatible Universal Serial Bus; Internal communications included aforementioned transmission of audio to or from operative through physical-ear and bone audio able to detect nearly inaudible whispers and translate Morse code via tongue-movement against special microphone panel in cheek; Waterproofing required blackout or loss of visual and audio.”

“Quite a guy, eh?” I thought to myself.

While Carter certainly seemed to have a fighting chance of operating in the real world, unlike his clunky albeit innovative predecessor, his mission reports drop off completely for several years after 1990 and only reappear in 2000 to declare that his agent status was terminated. “Disavowed” as the movies say. They don’t even have a record of what happened to him or his headgear. Whether he was lying to Salt about the “contextual responsibility” problem of a human evidence recorder being around so many missions or if he just didn’t want to get into a more complicated story, isn’t clear.
What was clear was that Carter was the Real Deal as far as having worked for the government, been a relatively deep agent and actually having some remarkable abilities was concerned. It was his mention of the archive and its location that lead me to check his authenticity. And it was this archive that he had claimed to break into to steal “the list.”

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All characters in this exclusive content are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are property of Dean Browell.

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