At Your Mercy

6

Carter had to be pathetic if he actually believed that I was falling for it.

See, here's the thing. You're put into an unusual situation that requires you to keep all of your five sense as wide open as you can possibly stretch them so you don't give fate a chance to intervene in at any point. That's the thing about running a country from the sidelines, you have to have backup plans and more backup plans in lieu of even a blip of your circumstances going south, and that is talking about mere situations. When you're dealing with a walking talking being that is able to think for himself, you grab a microscope and you vow to find out anything and everything that could potentially turn into an advantage or a liability.

Either Carter was really smart and I don't have a clue what was going on, or he is really naive and is giving in to nature's way of playing with him. And I'm not risking anything with vague assumptions.

I come unusually early into work the next day, which is probably because my heart hadn't stopped beating at an abnormally fast pace since I had walked out of that interrogation room with a successful step one in my mission report. Something about the whole talk still doesn't sit right with me. There are mastermind criminals that I haven't dealt with, and there are mastermind criminals I have dealt with, but knowing about all of them wouldn't bring me to the same conclusion that Jason Carter brought me to. And that was the fact that it was impossible to get even a micrometer of insight into who he really was.

We all have our angels and demons, things we want to wipe and things we want to keep, things we want to erase and things we want to write down and save with us forever. There is a fine line between being an official and being your own person. You have to ensure with magnifying glasses that in no way does the latter cross into the former and vice versa, but if there is one thing I have learnt over the years, it is that it is virtually impossible not to possess both.

Carter, on the other hand, with his lazy, hazy, easy aura seemed anything but the visual perception that I'd built of criminals over time. What with the incident with that girl Rosa, I had assumed that he sweet talks himself into and out of a maze of complications, and it seems to work pretty well for him; the appearance and the character he shows are more than enough to fit more perfectly than a puzzle piece.

But something just doesn't sit right.

You don't infiltrate two agencies by flirting, let's face it, how many employees will a person compliment before he crosses a line? You don't just disappear for six months when our top agency is literally on your tail for capture. Charming was an important tactic, no doubt, and with Carter's facial features it sits like a well fitted cork on a bottle, but it was what you label as an introductory tactic never the whole bloody plan.

There was a piece missing, and it was the corner piece and the desire to find it out was as stimulating as an unfinished puzzle is to a puzzle fanatic. Although I'm not really sure if I want to drop another bomb on myself on the course of the beginning.

Also, I've been sitting here for four hours and I haven't even met Carter yet. There's involved briefing about security protocols and emergency breakouts, all of which I turn a deaf ear to. In my opinion, if Carter wanted to escape, he would've probably tried something by now, or maybe thrown another move that didn't involve him submitting himself so easily on the basis of lies.

Carter has had an improved version of the same thing, with the angle turned around, which basically means that even if a hair on any part of his body steps over the boundary of his limitations in the thousand and one twisted ways possible that I could spew off the top of my head at leisure, we will find him in any corner of this planet he would choose and we would do things that would make killing look like the sensation of shower water hitting the top of his head.