She had made the mistake of showing up late to training just once. Really, it wasn’t even what she would have defined as ‘late’: just two minutes by her watch, and three minutes by Patrick’s. Yet his wrath (mostly at Lena’s assertion that any other watch but his mattered) forced Lena to conduct almost four hours of extracurricular surveillance training following random losers about the town until her feet felt like exploding.
In Patrick’s realm, if show-time was at nine, that meant at precisely nine you were there standing right in front of him, blood properly caffeinated and nicotined, with everything you needed hanging over your shoulder, ready to walk out the door at a word. By proxy, this meant you were to show up at 8:45, so that you could get all of your complaining out of the way and be reprimanded for all the things you forgot. Timeliness is difficult in theory for a 17-year-old. In practice, it’s even harder. But for a teenager who is also an aspiring super-spy, it takes an almost heroic effort. No one in the world of espionage simply walks directly to where they are supposed to be. No, there are proper routes you have to take, and proper actions to conduct while taking them. And god help you if you crossed paths with ‘the man in the red hat’, or ‘the man with the wart on his face’, or ‘the man in the impossible-to-see brown jacket’. Because then you had to lose him, and then take the alternate route.
By the way, that was precisely what was happening now. Patrick was being an asshole, and had put all three on her—all of them lying in wait right outside Vivika’s apartment.
Wart-face was sitting across the street ‘reading the paper’ and occasionally ‘looking around’ to make sure the color of the sky was still blue. Red-hat was a few apartment buildings down ‘checking on a few flowers’ and definitely not talking to Wart-face through a hidden radio. When Wart-face noticed Lena had stepped out, she noticed Red-hat definitely not cuing up on this by standing up and patiently waiting for a bus that had just passed. And Brown-jacket?… well, Lena still couldn’t see him. She just noticed Wart-face nod in the opposite direction.
Brazenly, Lena began her walk to the Interhostel by trapesing straight past Red-hat, with her very-most-courteous “Hello, Sir!” He smiled at her, as if to say, “I’m telling Patrick.” and Lena sheepishly winced. She had to make the conscious effort to avoid speeding her pace, as she knew Red-hat would wait until she was at least a half-block away before taking up the tail. Wart-face would stay on the opposite side of the street so that he could see further around any corners that Lena took. Brown-jacket would, of course, remain completely unseen, thus earning Lena another week or two of training. God, how she hated Brown-jacket.
She began by ambling about, checking to make sure the sky was still blue, checking to make sure that the neighbors still had windows, and occasionally checking to make sure that the very fabric of reality wasn’t unraveling behind her. You know, as people normally do. She did this at the most normal pace she could possibly manage, avoiding nervous shuffles and weird hand-movements that would give away her knowing about her tail. She really only had one goal for this: identify Brown-jacket. Once she did this, she could initiate her avoidance protocols. Yet nothing had really appeared, yet.
She turned a corner, walked a few meters, then stopped to tie her already tied shoe-laces. This gave her another chance to casually spy on the surveillance team, “Use your peripheral vision!” Patrick would always yell at her, “You don’t need or want to look directly at your tail! If they know you know they are following you, they will just switch teams!” This was nearly impossible, however, as her peripheral vision remained frustratingly untrained, so she allowed herself a few quick peeks behind her.
She knew that Red-hat wouldn’t round the corner until she was a block or so down the street, but he didn’t have to. Wart-face had already walked further down the ‘T’ of the intersection without changing direction, so he could easily see where she was walking without her seeing him. If she decided to cross the street, out of Wart-face’s watchful purview, then Red-hat would be able to easily see her do it. If worse came to worst, Wart-face would simply become her tail and Red-hat would be the one to lag behind. They needed only one set of eyes on her at any given time, and their mission was accomplished.
Frustrated, she began walking again, making sure to take the most measured steps possible. She knew they knew, but if this were the real world, spooking on her tail would alert them that they were, in fact, following her for a reason. She had to be natural, and so she naturally stopped to catch her breath from her dawdling stroll, and naturally wiped nonexistent sweat from her brow to show her tail that she was, in fact, stopping to catch her breath, “Idiot.” she mumbled at herself.
Another few blocks, another few minutes wasted. This was an unavoidable reality and she had to stretch her time out. Another few cracks studied, another set of weeds gazed at for no particular reason. She saw a cat, and decided to call to it for a few minutes. Yes, that should burn up some time. Pause… another few blocks… stare at cracks… pause… another block or two… at one point, she considered ducking behind a building and taking a chance on an escape. But she had tried this before, and the dead-end she had run into earned her another four-hours of nonsense surveillance from Patrick.
Finally, she made it out of the residential area into a commercial zone with shops she could wander into. It felt good to be able to window-shop for clothing or musical instruments, instead of having to feign interest in weeds or the color of the sky. The first chance she could, she wandered over to a clothing-shop and began studying the mannequins with extreme interest. Of course, she could care less about the mannequins—she was looking at the reflection in the window. In it, she saw Red-hat pause as well, and begin window-shopping at the blank wall of a dry-cleaning store. Sure, it didn’t make a lot of sense, but Lena realized how few people would actually put that together. When she first entered this world, she was amazed at how oblivious people truly were in their day-to-day lives. No matter how interesting her conversations in cafes were, no one cued in. No matter how obviously clandestine her actions on the streets were, no one seemed to be any the wiser, or even care for that matter.
“The art of being anything,” Patrick had told her, “Is what you are trained to notice, and your confidence in that ability. A fireman is trained to notice the smell of a fuel leak, or an uncovered electrical outlet; a police officer is trained to notice lumps in a jacket, or a hand shifting into a pocket; a carpenter is trained to notice crooked cupboards and the hinges on doors; a tax-person is trained to notice digits on a piece of paper, and the blocks they are adjoined to.
“Surveillance teams, whether working for an insurance company or intelligence agency, are trained to notice a great many things. But like any other job, all of these things fall under a single category: that which is out of place. Normal people always act predictably. They take familiar paths and knock before entering houses that don’t belong to them. They rarely initiate conversations with strangers on the street, and offer gestures with friends commiserate with the level of intimacy.