✔ᵉⁿᵍˡⁱˢʰ Ghost Story - American Assassin✔

shot 07

During her whimsical, if not insightful or whatever you wanted to call it, Nathalie stayed with whimsical forest run from a few days ago, she had been able to discover a lake nearby. The air was too cold to swim in, as was the general temperature, but it was a nice place to work. Quiet, peaceful and far away from this troop, not far enough, but far away.

So a random Nathalie sat cross-legged on the pier, all the files and notes spread out in a circle around her, swapping them back and forth. As soon as it fit and made sense with one person, it looked bad with another. How do you put the most diverse resumes and characters into an order that is understandable to everyone, when the individual conversations need to be included? There was no order in which the people could be placed.

"Throw everything in the water right now," Ronnie announced from the other end of the pier, coming up to them while Nathalie had already spent several hours putting all the documents in chronological order and still hadn't finished, "You're not going to make yourself happy by doing that when you're out here working. How long do you expect to stay here anyway?"

"Give me your hand," as soon as Ronnie was standing next to her, Nathalie immediately held out her hand, which he hesitantly gave to her, whereupon she immediately pushed back his sleeve, turned his lower wrist up and lightly grabbed his forearm, where she stroked his wrist with her thumb, "Nervous or is it just uncomfortable for you?"

"Should it be?" without avoiding Ronnie's gaze, Nathalie began to play with each of his fingers, doing nothing but watching his face, "Okay, what's it going to be? You're certainly better at flirting."

"Dilated pupils; a minimal twitch of the right corner of the mouth; a brief appearance of piloerection; a slight tilt of the head to the side, also to the right, and a suppressed smile that suggests you are anything but uncomfortable with the situation," Ronnie neither followed nor caught up with all that Nathalie had just said and was looked at by her as if all those words and terms were perfectly normal, "And that, was only a fraction of what your body language and micro-expressions revealed in that brief minute. Profiles are all well and good, but the person in themselves reveals much more than what they admit or what their record reveals about them. You may not be thrilled about why I'm here, but you're forgetting one thing, I'm supposed to get a picture of you because all states are not thrilled. No need to make my life difficult.

"Microexpressions, piloarrection," Ronnie repeated, drawing his eyebrows together slightly to cover the fact that in the next moment he did not know what Nathalie had just told him, "I thought you were an analyst. I guess you forgot to mention the Ph.D., by the way. Psychology, by the way."

"Microexpressions refer to our facial expressions and a piloarrection is the technical term for a simple goosebump," one of the most natural reactions you can have as a human, so it was nice to see that Hurley's killers still had some humanity in them and were not complete machines, "With everything we do, say or hear, our body reacts accordingly, whether we want it to or try to suppress it. Like, dislike, and experience provide that unconscious response. Our subconscious just does it. Not psychology, science. It takes years, if not decades, to understand all human facial expressions and what individual reactions mean. Universal facial expressions that are the same in every human, whether sociopath, psychopath, or anyone else. Might be interesting for you killers to look into. But hey, what does an analyst know about people. Data and facts are her specialty."

"Dating you must be a dream," the same Nathalie could only reply, especially since Ronnie was the one in the CIA's secret assassination program, "Was there ever a second one? If so, what must have been wrong with that guy?"

"More or less everything," Nathalie countered with a smile, picking out a particular folder from the clutter of bureaucracy, flipping two pages and pointing to a section of text she showed Ronnie in his own file, "Being able to interpret certain human patterns can be an advantage....or immensely helpful."

It seemed that Hurley's own files were unfamiliar to him. At least Ronnie didn't seem to have seen his file before. Be that as it may, Nathalie nodded for Ronnie to finally take the folder and see for himself what she had said so far and why the government's enthusiasm was not so great.