| The Good, The Bad, and Me | |||
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Edison Training Facility June 17, 2008, 1525 hours "I suppose the answer to that is yes, otherwise it makes this business a whole lot more difficult to contemplate." He looked at her eyes, seeing the intelligence behind them and now knowing that they were recording every feature of his face, or perhaps they had already done so. He felt the need to continue. "Then again, I don't think it is as easy as that. Some people are just plain bad, like Hitler I suppose. Others are just plain good, like Mother Teresa. The rest of us though are a little bit of both I guess. Like the Nobel Peace Prize winner who likes his girls just a little too young, or the charity worker who steals occasionally, or the drug dealer who saves a child from being run over. These people can't be said to be simply good or bad because in truth they are a mixture. Where you draw the line is down to the individual I guess. Sometimes it's made easier because someone else makes the decision, like when we go out on a mission. "Then again there are still situations where you have to make a decision whether or not to take a particular course of action against someone, like when your team made that hit on Konstantin. He was a bad guy, but were the guards who were protecting him? Most of them were, and I know that because I had to work with and talk to them, but a few of them were just ordinary guys, and I had to choose whether or not to kill them when they came after me. Am I proud of that? No, I'm not, because I know I've killed men who were probably good guys who got mixed up with the wrong people. At the same time it doesn't necessarily make me a bad guy because I was simply doing what needed to be done, and if someone is going to shoot at me then it stands to reason that I'm going to shoot back." He paused, wondering if he was making any sense. Her eyes weren't telling him much, or if they were he wasn't reading it well. "Ok," she replied. He thought back to what she had said, about being in a different place before. Even though she had given him surprisingly few details he got the impression that it hadn't been a place where morals came into things. What place could be like that? Had she been a terrorist before? Fuck, that was a massive oversight on his part. He'd never considered that, and he'd given her Yelena's name. Shit. She couldn't be though; it just didn't make much sense. Could the Americans really be that trusting of someone? He didn't think so based on those he had met, unless they didn't know. And would she really have told him? Slow down Nikolai, a voice said in his mind, she hasn't actually said that at all. There were probably other options if he cared to look, and he decided that he would. "Are you ok?" she asked him. "Yeah, just thinking. Its not an easy question to answer, at least not fully. I was thinking about one of the people in our team. He was RIF'd from the KGB and ended up working as a gun-for-hire. Did a lot of nasty little jobs for some undesirable people, but only because that was his skill and he needed to feed himself. There is surprisingly little work for former spies and soldiers that is legal, and after spending so many years doing the same thing it isn't easy to change. At least in Russia it isn't. I don't count him as a bad guy though, not at all. He simply did what he had to in order to survive, nothing more. Now, he is a particularly cold man when it comes to death and killing, but if you asked him what he felt when he was doing those nasty jobs he would say that he felt ashamed to be using his skills in such a way. That to me is the mark of a man who is more good than bad." "Do you trust him then?" "Yes, I do." She pondered that for a minute. "What if he was working for the enemy and you had to take him out?" "If it was a split second decision then yes, I would. Rarely do you get the chance to find out why someone is doing what they're doing, and if they have a gun pointed at you you tend to shoot first and ask later." It was a truthful response, he thought. "Ok, what if it was the other way round, and a bad guy was working for you?" "How do you mean?" He was glad to have left behind the examination of his conscience. He knew it was clear, but the very action was exhausting, and if he was going to keep from making a cock-up on this trip then he needed to be thinking clearly, or relatively so. "Well, if there was a bad guy in your organization," she explained. "That's easy: I'd kill the bastard. Or I'd let my boss handle things. I'm not really the type of person who likes seeing people get away with things; I tend to get a bit pissed off." "What if your boss knew about him though, but gave him protection in return for information?" Shit, now that was a good question. He knew this was leading somewhere, but he still couldn't see where. It was making sense and not making sense in the same instance. Ok, lets work this one out. "Do you mean a terrorist then?" "Yes," Paige replied simply. "Ok. Well, to begin with I highly doubt my boss would allow such a thing in the first place. I mean, he is a straight guy, and he can get even more pissed off than I can sometimes if people are not brought to some kind of justice. Putting that aside though, if that situation did arise then I'm honestly not sure what I would do. I'd like to do something, but I respect my boss completely, and I trust in his judgement no matter how strange it may seem to me." And he would never go against Sergei. That was a rule that had been set from the beginning. She paused for a second. He could see that she was trying to work out what to say next, or how to say it. Maybe she didn't want to give too much away. He couldn't blame her for that. She spoke. "Would that change if the bad guy had done something against you personally? What would you do then?" Ok, he said to her in his mind, maybe you've decided that you've got nothing to gain by keeping things from me. After all, the question held a hell of a lot more content than it would seem. And the way she had asked it, the sound of her voice, made him wonder what he was getting into. This wasn't going to be just a chat, or a discussion, or whatever it could be called. This had meaning. Significance. Consequences. Somehow it was going to end up shaping his actions, so he had to choose his words extremely carefully. "I'd kill them." Return |
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