Work In Progress

Impending rains forced John and Arcelia to camp for the night a little earlier than John had intended. He used the time profitably, though. Sherlock Holmes maintained that a person should know as little as possible that was not of use so as to save space in the brain for the things which would be of use. He very famously declared his intent, immediately after learning that the world is round, of forgetting it as soon as possible. John disagreed, believing instead that the brain is like a muscle — the more one crams into it the more space it has for more knowledge.

Kung fu masters hold that it is better to be the master of one punch than to be the student of ten. John held that it's better to be the master of five. And, while you're at it, knowing a few kicks wouldn't hurt either, to say nothing of a few chokes, a couple good limb breakers, and don't forget that throws can be enormously helpful in some situations. And, when you get down to it, traps are often more convenient than actually fighting.

John was in many ways a renaissance man: a jack-of-all-trades who had mastered quite a few of them. When it came to teaching people, this had its plusses and minuses. Since there was so much to learn about in so many subjects, it was easy to get started in any situation. The downside, as Arcelia was to come to know, was that the end was never in sight. On this rainy evening, the pluses predominated. Except that hard work is, always, hard.

After a few minutes of explaining the theory of building jungle shelters, John had Arcelia build two for them while he prepared dinner (and watched her). Arcelia took to building shelters quickly, and they ended up sleeping in the second and third shelter she built.

After dinner, John lent Arcelia a copy of the Ranger Handbook (United States Army, not Dungeons and Dragons) and settled down to read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. As they were settling in, Arcelia noticed John's book.

"Nietzsche? That sounds remarkably... stereotypical. Are you a follower of Nietzsche?"

John laughed. "Oh heavens no. He's wrong about nearly everything. I'm reading this," John gestured with the book, "to try to figure out what people see in him."

Arcelia put her book down and looked at John quizzicaly. After a moment she asked, "Do you have a contract for a philosophy professor?"

John chuckled. "It's hard to imagine a philosophy professor someone could need dead. No, this isn't professional."

Arcelia considered this for a moment. "So you really are a philosopher?"

John shrugged his shoulders. "I don't think that people should call themselves philosophers. It's pretentious, and if they're a 'lover of wisdom', then what's everyone else? A hater of wisdom?"

Arcelia smiled, a little impishly. "Some people are content to leave the hard questions unasked."

John replied, "I'm much more worried about the people who are content to leave them unanswered."

"But people who leave the hard questions unasked have to leave them unanswered."

"Not at all."

"How can you answer a question you haven't asked?"

John smiled. "Well, you do have to leave the answer unspoken, but people do it all the time. You know why a poker exists — to poke. Fires, specifically. Did you ever ask yourself why a poker exists?"

Arcelia started to answer, but John cut her off.

"—It might exist because every house should have a club in it. It might exist because a fire represents the uterous and the energy which creates life, and the poker symbolizes a penis thrust in it to stoke the fires of life. Maybe it's a holdover from the medieval period, around because men dream of being knights and want something that looks like a sword. Maybe it's just art — an exploration of the two-faced man who follows the straight path and deviates at the same time. Maybe it's just a big accident with no meaning or purpose at all — they're found in homes near fireplaces by a giant coincidence with no meaning. I doubt that you've ever asked any of these questions, but I also doubt that you've ever found a poker a great mystery too terrible to speak of."

Arcelia and John were quiet for some moments, then John finished, "Questions are great, but answers are better."

For the first time, Arcelia didn't mind agreeing with John. They both went back to reading. Some time later, Arcelia fell asleep first. Afterward, John set some alarms and traps around his shelter and fell asleep too.

John and Arcelia awoke at first light and continued on their way. There was a great deal that Arcelia wanted to talk about, but John insisted that they concentrate on their trip. "The first rule of staying alive is that when you're not someplace completely safe, pay attention. It's amazing how much you can see by looking for it."

John did consider it safe enough during mealtimes to converse, however, since he insisted that meals be eaten above ground. "The second rule of staying alive is when you're not someplace safe, control your circumstances. On the ground, we can be surprised from any direction. Thirty feet up, we can only be surprised from up or down, which are much easier to watch, especially with two of us."

At lunch time, Areclia brought up the question which she had been thinking about all morning. "How do assassins get paid? I'm guessing that you require payment up front, so people can't shirk on you, but what if they want to kill you afterwards to cover their tracks? Can you get paid without them being able to track you? And how do you even get assignments without the police finding you? You can hardly put ads on TV."

"Advertising is actually the easiest part. While nearly everything about our lives is done in secrecy, our results make the newspapers. A client won't say, 'get me The Black Viper' or 'get me the Dancing Baboon' or some other silly code-name. He will say, 'get me the guy who killed Eric Van Johnson,' or 'I want the guy who got the Tornatelli brothers'. In passing, I should mention that in the world of contract killers, 'guy' is a neuter-gender term. For whatever reason, most cloak-and-dagger assasins are female."

Arcelia interrupted John, "cloak-and-dagger assasins?"

"There are basically three types of people who kill (specific) people for money. The most numerous are your generic thugs who've gotten into the high-risk and high-pay thuggary. They're minimally competent, don't last very long, and are usually sent after people who annoy organized crime. Next, there are government agents. Most of them are actually in the military and come from one of the sniper schools. Their targets are usually military, though occasionally CIA-type assassins will go after political marks. Snipers are usually more competent than CIA-types, but they're also more specialized and often have easier tasks. Intelligence agencies frequently try to make their operations look like accidents. Not that they're good at it.

"And then there are the people like me. Freelancers. Our targets are usually political and sensitive. It's self-selecting — those are the types of jobs where a lot of money is involved. It's also the hardest, because people who turn to freelancers need quite a bit of distance from the killing. Because of all the secrecy and misdirection we have to employ, I call it the cloak-and-dagger work.

"Anyhow, you're right that the payment is the hardest part. Paying an assassin to kill someone requires several steps, all of which need to be untraceable for both the client and the assassin's sake. There's the request, the negotiation of payment, and the delivery of payment. None of them are easy, but the last is the hardest. Money is almost always traceable, and when it turns untraceable it's a big neon sign that something is up."

"So how do you do it?"

"The great thing about our world is that if someone with money has a need, someone will find a way to satisfy that need. There are a few solutions, but the common one is what you might call brokerage houses, or more colorfully, assassins' guilds. People who understand politics and finance arrange the payments and the cover for them. The best and most common covers are overpriced services that don't need to show results — motivational speaking, management consulting — that sort of thing. You can get away with some amazing prices, and don't have to provide anything tangible for the money. Art works, too, since artistic taste is so subjective."

"That's marvelous. This way the money doesn't need to be untraceable, and so you're not putting up any neon signs." Arcelia appreciated the ingenuity of it all.

"Yes, though it's tricky for the broker to get it to the assassin. It is a bit strange for a management consultant to himself hire management consultants, or for an artist to buy a lot of expensive paintings. It works for a consultant to buy paintings, but having a multi-million dollar art habit might look a little odd — you generally want to avoid repetition, because unnatural repetition might arouse suspicion. Pleasantly, while the client needs to pay the entire sum quickly, the broker has more leeway in getting the money to the assassin in multiple payments, since you can trust the brokers."

"They never try to keep the money? It's not like an assassin could sue him for it."

"True." John smiled mischeivously, "but most brokers don't try to double-cross professional killers. Perhaps it's natural selection."

"Of course. The ones who try it once don't live long enough to try it twice. So what about the intial contact? You can't be listed in the yellow pages."

"No. You're right that initial contact is very hard. There have been a lot of approaches tried. References and personal contacts are probably the most common — you know people who know people, and they can figure out how to get in contact with you — but that's also very risky. All it takes is one to turn on you and you're in danger. Some people actually do try web pages, but that's even more dangerous — what clients can find the police can find too, and the internet is not as anonymous as you might think."

"And what do you do?"

John smiled and thought for a moment. He wasn't sure how far he should trust Arcelia. Threading between answering her question and not giving away anything which might be dangerous, "The key," he finally said, "is to never stop moving. What's hidden can be found, but finding where something used to be and will never be again isn't useful."

Arcelia thought about it for a bit. "If you constantly change how to get in touch with you, you're harder to catch, but you're also harder to find. That would seem to argue against web pages."

"It does."

"So you need something which is easy to find, but which doesn't do someone much good to find. So you have some way that people can let you know that they want to talk with you so that you can contact them."

"In essense, yes. You give people a way of posting their contact information in an inconspicuous public place so that you can check them out and get back to them if you think that it's safe."

Arcelia was content with this, and they were soon on their way again.

Dinner started in relative silence. John was the first to break it, asking, "Are you serious about wanting to become an assassin?"

Arcelia considered this for a while. "I would say that I need to think about it, but only because it seems like I should. I know what my answer is; I would feel like I was rushing into things if I gave it too quickly. But that doesn't change what the answer would be."

John was pensive. "The truth is that I don't how to get you started."

"Well," said Arcelia practically, "how do most people get started?"

"Oh, I don't mean that; aside from joining an army, there are several straight-forward ways of learning. What I mean is that I don't know what the safest and best way to teach you is."

"Safest?" Arcelia was taken back by this. She had been getting so used to John that she had all but forgotten the unstable foundation that their relationship, such as it was, was based. She couldn't blame John at all — she could barely believe herself how completely she had forgiven him for killing her parents by now — but it was a painful check all the same. Though John was in fact a remarkably attractive man, Arcelia didn't want John at all in a sexual way. She was fascinated and engaged by him, though. He offered windows into worlds she had never before known she wanted to visit. Realizing that he couldn't trust her meant that many of these windows would be kept shaded. She had not given up all hope, though. Searching for words so that he wouldn't explain all of this to her and by doing so convince himself further, she managed to say, "Look, I know that things look bad. You killed my parents, and if they were know saints still, blood is blood. But the truth is that I'm not angry at you for it, and I don't want revenge. But obviously, those are just words. Is there anything that I can do that would let you trust me?"

"That," said John, "is the age-old problem, not just of assassins, but of people. How can we know whom to trust?"