My name is Gunn... James Gunn. I am a spy. To be more accurate, my life's work is in intelligence, if you actually want to call what I do intelligent. I guess you could say I'm a spy, but it's not what you might think. My profession is actually pretty pedestrian. It's just a job, not unlike any other line of work.
Sure there are more cloak and dagger jobs than mine in the agency, but even those spies don't travel the world fighting other spies. No one has a license to kill, and no one goes by a ridiculous numeric code like 007. In fact, except for a precious few, most people working in intelligence never even leave the office.
In an office. That's where my life as a spy started. Working what the agency refers to as state side as an analyst. There was nothing special about me. I was one of probably ten thousand analysts all pouring over more information than any one nation could ever need.
I was hired into the unit right out of college, but it didn't take long for me to decide that analyzing so called intelligence wasn't exactly my dream job. In fact the job was just plain tedious. I think that's why that Snowden fellow did what he did.
Snowden wasn't some sort of underground patriot or champion of the people. He didn't steal those secrets to expose corruption. He was just as bored as the rest of us and needed an escape. As an analyst, I was every bit as bored as Mr. Snowden. I just didn't have the cajones to try what he did. I thought about it though. Hell, we all thought about it.
So when the agency asked for volunteers to train for field ops, I jumped at the chance. Almost everyone that volunteered had military experience. I'd never even seen the inside of a recruiting center. The rumor was that field ops training was run by the navy seals, and it was supposed to be the most grueling thing a civilian could ever do.
It turned out the rumors were true, and training for field ops was by far the hardest thing I've ever done. More than once I thought about washing out, but the specter of going back to being an analyst kept me going. Somehow I managed to finish. Even though I was dead last in my class, I made the team. I was actually going to be real life spy.
So that's it. That's what I've been doing for the last twenty-two years. Acting as a so called spy. Right after I graduated I was sent to a small island paradise in the Caribbean where the agency set me up with an apartment and a souped-up Vespa.
The apartment didn't have secret doors or a hidden wall of weapons, and it didn't have a round bed that swings out from a wall, but that souped-up scooter could do 120 clicks on the flat. So I guess I do have one cool spy toy. It's just too bad that god damn Vespa had to be pink.
So my job in this paradise... if anyone really wants to call it a job... is to blend in with the natives, read local news, gauge the rhetoric of politicians, and in general keep tabs on the mood and attitude of the local population.
I'm not stealing secrets by taking photos with a tiny camera, or shooting people with poison darts. I don't target hardline politicians for assassination, and I don't sabotage power stations. And I've damn sure never been inside a secret installation disguised as a volcano.
All I do is gather commonly available information from local sources. The information I collect is what the agency calls intelligence, and every bit of what I gather gets put into reports. Yeah, I spend almost all of my time writing reports. My job is to disguise them as news stories, letters back home, and free-lance stories. Then those reports are reviewed and cataloged by those poor bastards back stateside that are still working as analysts.
Every once in a while the agency throws me a bone and asks me to keep tabs on some known foreign operative. In the field we call these people marks. They usually arrive via cruise ship or on a private yacht looking as if they are on vacation. I follow them and report where they go and who they meet with. Being well trained in the art of clandestine observation, the marks have no idea they are even being followed.
When I'm done following my marks, I don't pull a garrote from my watch to strangle them, or gas them with a trick umbrella, and I don't place a call from my shoe. No, I get to fill out yet another report. These reports look every bit as exciting as my other reports, except these have pseudonyms, or what most people would call fake names in place of both the mark and who he met with.
This use of fake names in the reports is a precaution, in case the report is somehow intercepted. Over the years I have become very adept at inventing clichΓ© names for the people I watch. The easy ones are names like Joe for an American, Omar for and Arab, or Nigel for a Brit. It's a bit tougher coming up with names like Makwangwala for that African prince I once followed. Makwangwala is an actual African name that means... Um, Prince.
Some days making up joke names for those I watch is the only joy I get from this job. In one report I named the mark Robert Mynob because he spent an entire week asking women to suck him off. Other days I get a kick out of simply watching all of the innocent people in the places my marks happen to be. The women I watch at these places usually make it into my reports as filler. The hot women make it into my fantasies.
Spying on other people's vacations may seem like a waste of time, but here on the island it does make some sense. This little country is a hotbed for fake identities and false citizenship. A few hundred thousand will buy you citizenship in this country. Along with that citizenship comes a newly minted passport. Bad guys use this place to get around international travel bans, and my reports let Interpol know exactly who to watch for.
Most of my follow and report assignments are complete boondoggles. It seems that even the worst of the world's bad guys need a vacation from plotting and mayhem. And bad guys vacation like no one else. I've spent many hours watching all manner of men chasing after loose women and fucking nasty whores, all while their lonely wives languish in bars or bake in the sand on the beach.
I'm good at what I do, but who wouldn't be? The job isn't that hard. But I'm still proud of the fact that in all my years working the island I never once lost track of an assignment. I did have one incident though. Well it wasn't really an incident. I'd say it was more like a close call, but I fucked around one day and almost lost my mark.
It went down like this... I was assigned to follow this bad guy from the Ukraine, and I knew that this guy really was one of the bad ones. For the first time ever, my orders came with the warning of "USE EXREME CAUTION" in bold letters across the top of the page. And at the bottom of the page was, "DO NOT ENGAGE".