Chapter 65: Becoming a Spy
Simon looked at Beckman's image on the screen for a moment before he spoke.
"Freedom," he said. "Everyone wants it. But it always comes with a price. What's the price here, General?"
Beckman studied him with the calm attention of someone who had been expecting exactly that question.
"Independence from the institutional structure means freedom from bureaucracy," she said. "It also means freedom from institutional support. When things go wrong — and they will go wrong — there's no cavalry coming. There may also be situations where other agencies actively work against you, because they won't know who you are or who you answer to."
"That's manageable," Simon said. "What else?"
Beckman didn't hesitate. "Your files won't pass through CIA or NSA channels. No record of your team's identities, no record of your operations. The circle of people who know you exist will be very small."
Simon followed the logic to its end. "Which means if you die unexpectedly, we become ghosts. No identity, no cover, no protection."
"That risk is real," Beckman acknowledged. "We have a contingency protocol. My successor would be briefed. It's not perfect — nothing in this work is — but it's not nothing."
"And funding?"
"Initial equipment and operating capital from my discretionary budget. After that—" She paused, choosing the phrasing carefully. "You'll have broad authority to acquire resources through operational means."
Simon understood what she wasn't saying directly. She was handing him something close to a privateer's license — the authority to take from criminals, to fund the mission through the work itself, outside the accounting systems that would otherwise track every dollar.
"One more question," he said. "Personnel. Am I selecting my own people?"
"I had intended to assign a team from existing agency talent," Beckman said.
"I'd decline that," Simon said immediately. "With respect. Fulcrum has penetrated both agencies deeply enough to compromise a hardware component before it left our possession. If you assign me a team through normal channels, I'm starting compromised. I need to recruit outside those channels."
Beckman was quiet for a moment. Then, without quite smiling: "That's what I expected you to say."
Simon looked at her. "General. Was that the answer you were waiting for?"
"From the beginning," Beckman said, "this was designed as an experimental unit. Low initial support, maximum operational flexibility, performance-based expansion of resources. I described the worst-case parameters because I needed to know whether you'd walk away."
"You were testing me."
"I'm always testing. It's the nature of this business." She folded her hands. "If you'd pushed back hard or asked for guarantees, I'd have noted the instinct for self-preservation and assigned you a comfortable role in a conventional department after graduation. Instead you asked the right questions and arrived at the right conclusions." A pause. "So. Are you in?"
"Yes," Simon said, without hesitation.
"Good." Beckman's expression settled into something that wasn't quite warmth but was adjacent to professional satisfaction. "Then we understand each other."
"Training," Simon said. "I still need it. If I can't appear in CIA or NSA facilities without risking exposure, how does that work?"
"Summer," Beckman said. "When you're done with the school year, I'll arrange a placement outside the normal institutional framework. The training will be real. The cover for it will be airtight."
She glanced at something off-screen — her watch, probably. "One standing instruction before we close. Going forward, you're not to expose yourself during operations involving the Bartowski team. You can observe, you can provide peripheral support, but your profile stays clean. Fulcrum doesn't have you in their files yet. That's one of your most valuable assets."
"So I can still run alongside their operations," Simon said.
"Carefully," Beckman said. "Learn. Watch. Don't announce yourself."
She reached toward the screen. "This conversation didn't happen, Mr. Lewis. Welcome to the work."
The screen went black.
Simon stood in Casey's apartment for a moment in the quiet that followed.
Then he went outside.
Casey was on the steps, a cigar burning between two fingers, looking at the early morning sky with the patient attention of a man who had spent years learning to be comfortable in silence.
He held a second cigar out without looking up.
Simon took it. Casey lit it for him.
They stood together and smoked for a while without speaking — the particular companionship of two people who had just been through something and were letting the edges of it settle before they tried to talk about it.
Casey broke the quiet first.
"It's not what you think it is," he said. "This life."
"I know," Simon said. "Lies to the people you care about. Cover stories that become the only story. The work getting into everything until there's nothing else."
Casey looked at him sideways. "Then why take it?"
Simon exhaled a slow stream of smoke and looked at the sky lightening above the rooftops.
"My life was small," he said. "Not unhappy — just small. Unremarkable. I spent years watching things happen to other people, writing about worlds I wanted to be in but wasn't." He paused. " I'm not interested in watching. And there are things worth protecting. The world is genuinely dangerous and most people don't know it." He glanced at Casey. "I do know it. That changes the math."
Casey was quiet for a moment.
"I was like you once," he said finally. It cost him something to say it — Simon could hear that clearly enough. "Willing to give everything for the people I worked with. Believed in the mission absolutely. No gray areas." He dropped ash from the cigar. "After enough years, the belief wears smooth. Becomes habit. Then becomes just — weight."
"Is that why you almost went through with it tonight?" Simon said. "Because it was weight rather than belief?"
Casey didn't answer. Which was, in its way, an answer.
"You didn't go through with it," Simon said quietly. "That's the part that matters."
"Don't make it something it isn't," Casey said. "The operation changed. Beckman's orders changed. My compliance changed accordingly."
"Sure," Simon said. "That's one way to tell it."
Casey dropped the cigar and stepped on it. He looked at Simon for a moment with an expression that was difficult to categorize — not warm, not hostile, somewhere in the space between those things where the most complicated feelings tended to live.
"Don't stay out too late," he said. "You have school."
He turned and went back inside.
The door clicked shut behind him.
Simon stood alone on the step, the cigar burning down between his fingers, the neighborhood slowly waking up around him — a car starting somewhere nearby, a dog beginning to bark three streets over, the particular gray-pink light of an early California morning spreading across the rooftops.
He thought about what he'd agreed to. What it would cost. What it might become over years he couldn't see yet.
Then he dropped the cigar, put it out under his heel, and walked to his car.
He had school in three hours. An exam in fourth period. A training session with Meg at five. A shift at the Buy More after that.
And somewhere underneath all of it, quietly and without announcement, the beginning of something he didn't have a name for yet.
He drove home through the empty streets and let the city hold its silence around him.
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