Hyperleggera

The Mark (Part One)

Pop-Tarts

In which we meet Flo­rence, an assas­sin who flies to Budapest for a mis­sion about to go ter­ri­bly wrong.

Words: Peter Orosz | Pic­tures: Balázs Fenyő

“Flo­rence.”

His voice on the phone grav­elly, booming.

“Flo­rence, are you there?”

I savor the last moment of silence. It’s Larry from the office.

Flat black for stealth, but why the fuck does a JDM Honda run into the rev lim­iter at 8,400 rpm?

Headed home down the Belt­way, dri­ving shoes buried in what passes for car­pets in an FD2 Civic, shoul­derblades white against the bucket seats, I wonder if Larry was in the supermarket.

Observ­ing.

I have never seen his face. He could have been the guy eyeing the hon­ey­dews or the one trying to decide between salmon and rotis­serie chicken. The surfer dude in the auto-​checkout lane with his lone PayDay can­dy­bar. I’m right behind him, feel­ing hag­gard and para­noid in a white halter top, hair uncombed, clutch­ing my box of Frosted Wild Mag­icburst Pop-​Tarts with the action figure inside.

What would Soichiro Honda think of a Type R engine in 2008 that failed to rev above and beyond 12,000? Would he retort with a slap?

A beheading?

Cruis­ing down the pass­ing lane, flat black, no wing, no red Type R logo, no noth­ing, my com­put­ers obfus­cat­ing every cop signal, I keep the revs at eight thou­sand and for the first time since Larry called, I feel calm again.

Still. Why not twelve thousand?

“Hello, Larry.”

“Hello, Flo­rence. Giant Food on the corner of Old George­town and Democ­racy. Break­fast food aisle. One twelve-​pack of Frosted Wild Mag­icburst, please.

“Blue­berry flavor,” he adds.

Then he hangs up.

The flash card con­tain­ing the mis­sion is stuck in the blue­berry fill­ing, sealed in teflon-​coated plas­tic. Four square mil­lime­ters, two ter­abytes, I comb my hair away from the nape of my neck to insert the card in the neural inter­face dis­guised as a tattoo of a cut­tle­fish. The merge screen comes up on my HUD. I blink in a pat­tern to okay it off and make a cup of coffee while the data syncs.

Words. Gram­mar. News. Accents. Poetry. Street talk. Novels. Speeches.

I wonder what took a ter­abyte to hold when the only vowel the lan­guage seems to use is e.

I pack my gear and race the Honda to Dulles.

What makes a laser print­out more real than hours of footage wired directly into the visual cortex?

It’s five a.m. on a metal­lic rasp­berry of a June morn­ing. Cud­dled up on a sofa in an aban­doned ware­house by the Danube. I read the news in Hun­gar­ian. Any­thing to avoid look­ing at the print­out which the bureau had left on the coffee table.

T-minus five hours and I’ve got the jigs and it’s not from my cup of Earl Grey nor from my Provigil dis­penser dialed up to 300 mg from my usual one fifty.

What make twelve hun­dred grainy dpi more real than a vivid memory, how­ever fake?

Rule number one, you do not know the mark. Rule number two, you do not know the mark. The bureau never fucks up. Except now.

See, I know him.

I just don’t know who he is.

To be continued…

∞ Published on Saturday, June 14th, 2008

4 comments