He nods slowly, grimacing as pain moves through his shoulders.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t have told her anything,” I point out. “A professional operative, whether one who works for me or the CIA or for anyone else, would never reveal such a top secret job to anyone. You did it twice. First to Tessa, and then to Nora, to save your own life.”
“No,” he says quickly, “I never would’ve given up my identity to save myself. I wouldn’t give a shit if Nora killed me—I only told her because I knew that if I didn’t she’d kill Tessa.”
He is truthful in those words, I strongly believe.
“But even for her,” I say, “you should never have told her anything. She is a civilian. An innocent. And by telling her the truth, you made her an unknowing accomplice. And a target.”
“I know,” he says, shaking his head and looking at the floor again, “but when it comes to her, I’m weak. I always have been. You should know, Faust”—his eyes lock onto mine—“you love Izabel. You should understand why I had to tell Tessa something.”
“You told her simply because she had suspicions,” I say. “I could stand here all day and tell you why that reason is unacceptable, but that’s not why I came.”
“Are you going to kill me?” he asks almost listlessly.
Dorian Flynn is not afraid to die, and a part of him I believe wants to. Perhaps he has thought about death more than any of us, I do not know, but there is no shortage of quiet despair inside of this man. The smiling, facetious face he wears in front of all of us is just a mask covering a somewhat troubled soul.
“You have five minutes to explain,” I announce. “At the end of that five minutes, I will know whether or not I’m going to kill you.”
He nods.
A betrayal such as this one, when an operative secretly works for another employer without my knowledge, would almost always come with the heaviest of consequences—immediate death. But one must be careful to dish out such a sentence before first knowing from that person what information has been leaked, and to whom. And the fact that he is a private contractor for U.S. Intelligence also means that I must be prepared to have more than just Vonnegut and The Order coming down on us, if I kill him. Depending on the nature of his status with his superiors and what kind of private contractor Dorian is, it might be smarter to keep him alive.
“I’m a SOG agent,” Dorian says, “and in case you think I’m easy to break, that if you ever were to send me on a mission and expect me to break if I got compromised, you’d be wrong. I was commissioned just to observe and gather information first. But when the time was right, I was allowed to approach the leader and tell him the truth about who I am, and then present the deal prepared by our government—I was going to tell you the truth eventually.”
“You said approach ‘the’ leader.”
He nods. “Yes. My mission started in Bradshaw’s organization, before you took over and I became a part of yours. The CIA has been searching for Vonnegut for more than thirty years. Kind of like that succubus out there”—he nods toward the wall, indicating Nora—“Vonnegut is a ghost. No one that I have ever known or heard of even knows what he looks like, or if he’s even a man. Just when we thought we had him, we’d find out at the last minute that the suspect was just a decoy. There is no bigger bounty on any man’s head on this planet than the one on his.”
“So you were implanted into Bradshaw’s black market organization, hoping to find information on Vonnegut?” I believe I know the rest of the story, but I must be sure.
“Yes,” Dorian answers. “I tried to get into The Order ten years ago, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t like they were taking applications. It was impenetrable. Elusive. So, I settled for one of the black markets. Much easier to get into, I guess because they’re not as careful with how they do business. Anyone who kills innocent people for money is too blinded by greed to care about risk and reckless choices.”
“And you assumed that because the black markets and The Order were in the same business, that being on the inside of one would eventually lead you to Vonnegut.”
He nods again. “I know it was a stretch, but it was all that I had to go on. Microsoft and Apple are two different entities in the same business, in competition with one another, but they keep up with each other because they have to. Know your competition, right?”—he shrugs, and then winces when he realizes it was not such a good idea considering the state of his shoulders—“but it did pay off somewhat,” he adds. “Look where I am now”—he laughs—“in a fucking cell where some shot-nosed bastard of a teenager jerked off while he did his time, but my boss happens to be a man who was once closer to Vonnegut than any other man I’ve ever known.”