Justice Unserved, Nadia Siddiqui [brene brown rising strong .TXT] 📗

soft or overly affected. It’s bordering on clinical. He doesn’t know how to answer. What answer is he supposed to give? Was there something he was supposed to do? A task that he has failed to accomplish? The fact that he can’t remember what happened before this room is starting to cause a mild panic in the pit of his stomach. Something that he doesn’t want the woman on the other end of the line to know. So he’s silent just a moment too long, and the woman speaks again.

“Is it done? Is the girl dead?”

Nathan wants to speak but it feels like his throat hasn’t been used in days, like sandpaper on the inside of his vocal cords, and he doesn’t know how to answer them. Given that he’s the only one in this room, he doesn’t think he has killed anybody. Still, his eyes roll in the direction of the bathroom. Is there a body in there? None of the lights are on and he doesn’t trust himself to get up and head in there to look one way or the other. Nothing good can come from being in there because if there is a dead body in the bathtub somehow, then there is still a third person that is unaccounted for, so despite knowing so very little, he is willing to bet that, somehow, whoever this girl in question is, she got the better of him.

Why does it feel like that’s never happened before?

“Who—” He stops, clearing his throat and wishing for water. “Who is this? What girl?”

The line is silent. Like the world has gone still there isn’t a single sound from anywhere in the moments that he waits with bated breath. The line goes dead a moment later.

Whatever this situation is, whatever mess he has woken up to find himself in he is only sure of a few things. That he needs to get the hell out of here and that the idea of going to the police seems like the worst possible thing that he could possibly do.

He manages to push himself up to a standing position and he staggers in the direction of the bedroom to find nothing out of place and takes a towel off of the small shelf and wraps it around his head like a hair turban to help hide and absorb any of the blood that might still be leaving him. He’s sure that it’s on his shirt and pants but he can’t help that. Those feel like things that he can figure out once he’s no longer in an active crime scene.

Thankfully, there isn’t a single person in sight as he sways down the hallway. The world finally seems to stop spinning so much as he reaches the lobby where there’s more natural light coming in through the dirty sliding glass doors. He doesn’t stop at the desk for information, and he is only vaguely aware of the fact that one of the employees is calling after him. Either because they are concerned for his well-being or because they are upset about the fact that he is stealing one of their towels.

It seems to be early enough that the only bodies he passes are people in business suits on their way to their early morning commutes or on their way to grab coffee before committing themselves to their long work hours for the day. He can’t say he blames them for looking. He likely looks like some wineo that got lost on the way home and needs to see a doctor. It’s hard for him to focus on their faces, it’s almost like everything is just a little hazy around the corners of his vision and it seems to get worse the harder he tries to focus on it.

He turns down the first alleyway he can find and ducks behind a dumpster, leaning against the cool shady section of brick in an effort to calm his breathing. He just needs to figure out where he is, and then he can try to figure out how he got there. Hopefully, if he is very lucky he will find out who he is in the process. He was expected to kill somebody. Is he an assassin? A secret agent? Government spy? If he is any of those things, what kind of woman was he supposed to have killed that was able to get the drop on him?

The phone in his pocket starts to vibrate again, a silent beacon of information. He pulls the phone from his pocket without delay and answers it quickly. “Hello?” he greets this time, and the woman on the other end is silent for a long moment. He can hear her breathing in deeply before answering with a very bored tone,

“Nathan, you know who you are.”

Like a sleeper cell needing a keyword to remember who he was and what he needed to be doing, the mention of his name sparks something inside of him. He knows that this is not his real name but the one that has been assigned to him. He knows that this is his code name and the only thing that he will ever be called again.

“Nathan, I have scheduled an evac team and a cleanup crew. Remain where you are, we will discuss this complication at the debriefing.” Then the line goes dead again. It’s a strange sort of relief, the way that his mind emptied and all of the questions just faded away like they were no longer important. He knows who he is, just as much as he knows that all of those questions that were plaguing him moments ago will no longer matter once he’s extracted. Once he’s back in the briefing room he will be given a new assignment and this one will never have existed. He is only one of many. The mental reset has already begun as he lowers down to