CRUSH
by Rob Ashcom

© copyright 2009 Robert Lewis Ashcom, Jr.

Day 1: Monday

The Ideal Self?! Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his red eyes in the dark? This is the self who is coming into his own.
- D. H. Lawrence

I wash my faith in dirty water
‘Cause it gives my mind a little order
- Seal

:: 1 ::

Daniel Kiernan woke up in his crummy St. Louis office feeling like shit. His head ached and there was a feeling in his stomach like he’d just missed being hit by a bus. Pushing aside the covers, he sat up on the creaky Army surplus cot, stirring the musty canvas smell into the air that always reminded him of Boy Scouts. 
East St. Louis squeaked and hummed its way back to life outside the one window, tinted alien orange by the pre-dawn amber of streetlights that never seemed to achieve full illumination. A solid background murmur of traffic radiated from the bypasses and bridges swerving around, over, and away from Kiernan’s district.
Kiernan’s life, his very existence, felt at odds with that world outside the window. There was nothing and no place left unchanged by his 354 days at the National Security Agency. In the three years since, he had worn out four or five disturbingly unfashionable Kevlar-lined jackets and spent far too much time preparing for ninja assassins, snipers, poisoners, crooked cops, the IRS—whatever retaliation schemes that books and TV could suggest and his sketchy knowledge of the Agency couldn’t refute. He’d gotten a gun license in practically every state in the union and carried an awkward chunk of New England steel under his left armpit every day, every year. 
Before the NSA, he had been trained as a horseman, swimmer, runner, shooter, and fencer in the modern Pentathlon. Which was weird enough, but cool in an off-beat way. Then the NSA had retooled him for the practical affairs of state as a spy and a killer and Kiernan didn’t want to know any of that shit anymore. He wanted it out of his head . . . which was a joke since it was hard-wired into his brain and body. And the fact that it was serious, and a joke, pretty much covered all the bases.
And then there was the dream—the nightmare really—of his last day at the NSA. The dream that gummed up his thoughts at this moment as he sat on the hard edge of the cot. Dreams should be transient and preferably about sex or flying (or both). This dream felt like a kick in the balls. A giant size cup of Coke poured over his preteen head at the summer fair. A fucking disaster. And it started and ended with Philip Saunders, putatively of the National Security Agency.

: : : : : :

Walking into Phil Saunders’ office was like jumping from 1950 to 2009 fast enough to induce vertigo. The faded beige linoleum floor disappeared and the thick Berber carpeting began. It smelled like long chain polymers and Windex, not the Pine-Sol and stale tobacco smell outside. No visible wires marred the elegance of Phil’s titanium iMac perched on his equally elegant wooden desk. It made Kiernan hopeful. The rest of the building had only made him homesick and depressed.
“Tested right up there on the written,” Phil said, not looking up from the open folder on his desk. Kiernan sat in one of the upholstered club chairs before the desk, like a student in the principal’s office, and tried to ignore the environmental shock. Then Phil looked up from the desk and gave Kiernan a significant look. “You did pretty well at the gym, too.”
“But tests don’t tell the whole story, Mr. Kiernan, do they? We might glean the truth out of a whole lot of tests, but you just never know. Especially with people. NSA excels at signal intelligence. I excel in gleaning the truth of people.”
Phil let the pause grow, and Kiernan knew enough about the rhetorical styles of old men (mostly the guys out front of the Ivy Country Store in denim overalls who kept their semi-annual farming income in their thick leather wallets and were likely to stretch a story out over the available time which neared infinity when translated into the temporal mindset of a boy) to just let the pause hang there and percolate.
“We’ll call it training,” Phil continued at last, “but you’re going to be tested every single day for the next year. Out of that testing, a better man may arise, ready to help protect this country from some truly evil people. And then you might not make it. No promises either way; no bullshit. So you ready to try?”
Phil’s handshake was like iron even if his gut pushed open his shirt buttons just above the belt line. Years later, Kiernan could be fairly sure that none of his trainers over the next 354 days were actual employees of the NSA. Somehow it still felt better to assume that Phil had been.

They approached him at a World Cup Pentathlon qualifying tournament held conveniently at the University of Virginia. Graduation was a little over a month away and Kiernan had zero idea what to do. He channeled that anxiety into his events. Shooting targets with the air pistol was like meditation or prayer or some post-coital bliss of detachment. He won. Fencing was an explosive expression of frustration. His nerves were popping like blue arcs on a 50,000 volt stun gun. To score on his faceless opponent he need only unleash that lightning. He was buzzing and tingling with adrenaline when they approached him.
“NSA does code-breaking stuff, right?” he asked the recruiter who stopped him as he turned away from the scoring announcement for the fencing with the small individual event trophy in his hand. The guy’s name was David something. It was all a blur. Just a guy only a little older than Kiernan, lots of smiling, khakis and a white Oxford cloth shirt. No tie. University of Virginia’s ancient Memorial Gym echoed with voices and Kiernan felt a bubbling craziness inside himself.
“The majority of NSA’s efforts are directed at gathering foreign intelligence and protecting our own electronic resources,” David had answered.
“But gathering for you guys means electronic eavesdropping, right? Not actual people skulking around the market in Kabul listening to the locals?”
David Whatever-His-Name-Was smiled. “Skulking?”
“Alright—lurking,” Kiernan allowed.
The fencing crowd was breaking up and drifting out of the gymnasium, heading for the Aquatic Center and the swimming event. People stopped to congratulate Kiernan, slap him on the back, and jostle on past. It seemed like an odd place to be having this conversation.
“Gathering intelligence these days means electronic intelligence,” David said with the smile still on his face.
“So what about guys on the ground?”
“That’s why I’m talking to you. We have limited openings for field agents. You need to be smart, first off, but you also need to be tougher than our usual math majors.”
 “And be able to fence, ride horses, and swim? I mean the shooting and running parts are obvious…”
David smiled wryly, but didn’t give him any more than that.
“We did some background on you,” David said. “This isn’t the only reason we want to send you through the training program.” David waved at the rapidly emptying gym around them. “You got good grades in hard classes and you wrote two interesting papers we got from UVA’s website. So what do you say, Daniel? It’s a year of the most advanced training the Department of Defense could come up with. No commitment to anything but secrecy if you wash out or don’t start the job in the end.”
“Yeah, but I have all these hot job interviews . . .” Kiernan grinned. “Fuck that. I’m in.”

Kiernan and David were just outside the gym into the blinding afternoon sunlight when a hard grip spun Kiernan around, slamming him face-first against the gym’s brick wall. He saw stars and dropped the fencing trophy, hearing a crack as it hit the pavement. And completely lost his temper. He turned off the wall with that electrical snap, driving his right fist before him as if it held the sword. 
The man in front of him folded up around his fist like a sheet on a clothesline and dropped to the sidewalk.
Another guy in clothes like David’s but a short military haircut moved in with fists raised, and Kiernan thought, this guy’s the real shit. The face, the eyes, the bunched muscles of his forearms said there was pain to be had from underestimating him. So Kiernan dropped his guard, the guy practically pounced on the opening, and Kiernan hit him with the right fist in his face and solar plexus as quick as a double-click after too much coffee. Crew Cut levitated backwards a few yards, landing face down on the hot asphalt of the gym parking lot. He closed up into a fetal position, gasping and straining to breath through partially paralyzed lungs and a smear of blood where his nose used to be.
Kiernan felt like he should be shocked. He hadn’t been in a fight since fourth grade. He had just been attacked. He searched for some reaction, but couldn’t find much. The tournament had dulled his excitement receptors.
Looking around, Kiernan saw several people frozen in various stages of getting into their cars, all staring at him. He gave them an awkward, apologetic wave with his bruised right hand, and shrugged as if to say, “Hey, shit happens,” when that was exactly not what he was feeling.
The guy with the crew cut—now on his hands and knees spitting blood and teeth onto the already red cement—tried to say something, but his stunned lungs still weren’t pulling in enough air. Kiernan walked over to him, not sure of the etiquette involved in the attacker/attackee relationship. After gasping and straining to talk, the guy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper, dropping it in front of Kiernan.
“I think that’s for me,” David said and quickly stooped to pick up the paper. He wasn’t looking so cheery now, Kiernan noticed. The smile was gone and it looked like he’d lost his tan as well. The hand that picked up the paper showed a small, quick tremor. David unfolded the paper, avoiding the bits of blood it had picked up from the ground, and looked at it for a moment. His face lost any last trace of the cheery David of only a minute ago.
“I gotta say . . .” he started but didn’t finish. He frowned, folded the paper up again and put it in his pocket. “Well fuck it. All I can say is that was your first test and you passed with flying colors. Come on, these guys can take care of themselves. Where the fuck is this Aquatic Center anyhow?”

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Rob Ashcom
An interaction designer, a writer, and a musician who lives in San Jose, CA with his wife and two daughters. Crush is his first novel. To learn more about him and his latest CD, Dogs Don’t Care About Magnets, and to preview the upcoming sequel to Crush entitled Reprise, visit www.robashcom.com.