Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Ferrari Delguessimo: You Can Handle the Truth

Well, it's like I told you before. No lies, that's the first thing you learn being a spy, believe it or not. Once you start telling lies, you've got to keep them all straight, and then you've got to avoid allowing people to meet to whom you've told conflicting stories. The longer you keep on doing it, the harder it gets. Not to mention, I don't like lying. So maybe I missed out a few details, but most of what I told you was true. I'll tell you everything now, but it might be a bit jumbled.

So, we got through the first wave of Russians. Grigori's men, I was pretty sure. But before that, I'd been in touch with people who knew people who knew things, though I was trying to keep them at arm's length through college. I said before, my family were pretty influential. And like I said, I wanted to be the best I could be, in everything I could do. Those kinds of grades get some attention. Initially from exam boards looking for cheats, but then the results of their investigations get looked over by other organisations that are looking for the right kind of talent. Languages and martial arts was an interesting combination of hobbies, and my grades on the standard subjects were a little way above average across the board.

Recruiters came to me right out of high school, because the private lessons I'd been taking gave me a skill portfolio that matched some profile, made me someone who might be useful to them in the future. I should probably say now, 'they' weren't the CIA. Not as such, anyway. It was a specialised team that were kind of but not quite under the Agency's aegis. We might end up reporting to a few different agencies, from different countries, depending who was dealing with a threat somewhere. We'd never be spying on our own governments, but they kind of guided into positions where we might be picked up by independent groups, or by organised crime. If we were we'd be contacted by some agency who was facing off against that particular threat, which wasn't necessarily the agency we'd originally signed up with.

The deal was, I'd take a year out before college. Basic training, but they couldn't exactly tell me what they'd offer training in. I'd get new skills, they promised. That was good to me. And there was a financial package as well, but that wasn't a big part of it. I'd take any help I could get to be the best at what I wanted to do. And they trained me, and they made me a spy. It's not like in the movies. Well, you probably guessed that much. I was just working for some faceless group that would someday call on me to protect peace and democracy. The enemy would probably be terrorists. It always was, by that point.

Sometimes they kept me posted on things that might be going down in my area. Like this thing called Mr Hook's Box. See, there was this really important guy called Mr Hook, and he was known to [redacted] with [redacted]. Our people had run into him a few times across the world, from Beijing to [redacted], and he had even been sighted at the scene of [redacted]. But now he wasn't an active participant, because he was [redacted]. But he'd left behind this Box, which was believed to contain some of his [redacted], so there were half a dozen different criminal groups after it. Some of them actually knew how to use it, but some were just smugglers who thought they could sell it to the highest bidder.

Yeah, that's pretty much what they told me. Nothing at all, except this Box was important. It was just one more thing that might possibly be of interest, so if I heard anything about it I had to report back to them. It wasn't a major thing. Really, all they wanted from me in college was to tell them if certain organisations seemed to be recruiting from the martial arts clubs. I'd sent in one or two reports about suspecticious people, but I did my best to keep to a normal life. The training they'd offered me was useful, but my schedule was packed enough through college, and I wanted to keep my distance.

Then towards the end of my second year, I got an urgent communication. Mr Hook's Box was at Lanchester University. They didn't know why, they didn't know how, they just knew it was there. They wanted me to do everything in my power to find where it was being stored, and call in a team to recover it. I told them no; I'd keep my eyes peeled, but the college campus was large enough that I wouldn't even know where to start looking. And as far as I was concerned, that was that.