Page 3 of Whisper

He’d maxed out of Arabic his sophomore year and switched to Farsi, taking courses until he had to do independent study with his professor to go further. He’d spent two summers on an exchange program in the Middle East, first in Egypt and then in Lebanon and Syria.

He was careful overseas, just to prove his doubters wrong. His professor hadn’t wanted him to go.“It’s too dangerous, Kris. You advertise your sexuality.”

Of course he did. When the world looked at him, all anyone saw was a skinny brown gay boy, a kid full of attitude and trash. He had two choices. He could live out loud, take the hard world exactly as it came, be exactly who he was. He wasn’t wrong; the world was. People moved out of the way on the streets forhim. So what if they moved because they hated him? They stillmoved. So what if he was a scrawny Puerto Rican with too big a mouth and too little sense? New York was full of old gays who wanted little twinky white boys, anyway. He picked fights with everybody, with anybody. He had a sharp tongue and no patience for the sidelong looks he got. He just lived louder, filling up the space everyone left around him.

Or, on the other hand, he could try and bury everything, try and erase the gay and erase the brown and try to live a white bread kind of life. Put away the lip balm and stop cursing in Spanish. Learn Frisbee and golf and be like the upper-class private school white boys he saw in Central Park, and not the street soccer and football at his low-income school. He could make his world shades of white and pale, shades of sucking up and always trying to fit in, shades of never being enough, and being told, in a thousand, million, tiny ways, that he would never, ever fit in, no matter how hard he tried.

Fuck that.

He’d take his discrimination to his face, thank you very much. The world would acknowledge him. Somehow.

He’d left New York with the empanadas and platinos his mom had packed him, two suitcases, and a promise to never go back. Not to his father, who hadn’t looked at Kris since he caught him jerking off to a picture of the Backstreet Boys, and not to the rest of his classmates who’d called himprincessandfairyandfag. Not even to his mother, who’d dreamed of flying back to the island and living with her sister, escaping his dad and the endless nights of beer drinking and watching TV for hours on end. His mom was made for Puerto Rico, for wind in her hair and a salt breeze, and friends cooking together as music played over the sound of the surf and the birds twittering from tree to tree. She wasn’t made for car horns and subway platforms, the stink of hot urine on Manhattan’s blacktop.

He hadn’t known where he was made for, either. Not New York. But where?

He’d never dreamed, never imagined, his path would take him to the CIA.

But then he’d dreamed of spies in luxury suits, seduction in far-flung lands, meeting a man’s gaze across a crowded bar, swirling a Martini. Adventure. Intrigue.

And for once, someone wanted him.

A week after graduation, Kris was at Camp Peary, The Farm, the CIA training center.

He’d been certain, then, he had made the biggest mistake of his life. He was a bookworm, studious until happy hour, when he enjoyed his vodka and his cocktails and a man to go along. He had more clothes than sense and went to the gym only to show off his long legs in tiny shorts and ogle the beefy guys pumping iron. And for the sauna. And the blowjobs.

He liked first-world comforts: technology, comfy beds, and hot men waiting for him in them.

Halfway through the CIA’s training course, he’d parachuted out of a plane and eaten worms for three days while trying to evade his trainers, career military officers, who had spent their entire lives hunting people.

He’d been captured in a swamp, hiding in the reeds. His trainers had hauled him back to The Farm for the next round of instruction: how to withstand an interrogation.

Kris had thought he’d be the first one captured.

He was the second to last.

During weapons training, he was the only one out of his class of twenty who had never fired a weapon before. Aghast, the instructors had begrudgingly started at the beginning of firearms training, all nineteen others, former military officers and federal agents, plodding along beside him as he fumbled through how to hold his weapon, load an empty clip, pull the slide back, dry fire.

Eyes slid sideways, staring at him in the cafeteria. The military guys stuck together, as did the LEOs, the law enforcement officers switching over to intelligence, in their own tight-knit fraternities.

There was no room for a twenty-one-year-old scrawny brown boy just barely graduated from college. Especially a twenty-one-year-old with a shell choker, distressed jeans, and tight t-shirts. He kept to himself, and the others seemed to prefer it that way.

The bulk of their training had been in the classroom, followed by the real world. CIA officers, for the most part, spent their time working to recruit foreign nationals to spill their secrets, betray their own governments. Give information to the CIA. That process was purely personal. Psychological.

Who was a good target to recruit? Were they vulnerable in any way? Reliable? How could they be approached? What aspects of their life could be exploited, for good or for ill, to develop the person into a source, an agent of the CIA? Were they, ultimately, friend or foe?

Kris had spent his whole life observing people—men in particular—and the exercises on targeting individuals, psychological analysis, the role-play of approach and ingratiation, were child’s play to him. The military officers were too domineering, the former LEOs too interrogative, but he successfully recruited the assigned source each and every time.

He had excelled at his surveillance detection routes. Walking home from bars alone and being a single gay man in a metropolitan city—

Well, he’d learned how to watch his back long ago. It had been second nature to run the surveillance detection routes, the more complex the better, and pick out any tails following him. One of the military officers missed three of his tails on his final exam and was sent home that same day.

Kris didn’t have to ever come out because he was never in. Everyone assumed, at first glance, what he was, and that was just the simplest for everyone. He heard a few comments, ignored the muttered curses. Gritted his teeth whenever “fag” was tossed around, a cultural synonym foridiotorweak.

It made him work harder, prove them wrong. He’d proven everyone wrong so far. He’d keep going. He’d never stop.

He excelled in most areas, passed in others. He’d have made a good case officer, going overseas to an embassy and pretending to be a low-level State Department official while trying to flip sources and foreign nationals. Maybe they would send him to Bahrain, he’d thought. Or Lebanon. Or Syria. He could work both sides of Sunni-Shia divide, target Iranian agents operating in Hezbollah and Syria as well as Hamas and Sunni extremists in Lebanon. He knew the culture, how to move around. He even knew how to find the right man in Beirut, or in Damascus. In Cairo, too.

He’d dreamed of adventure, of living overseas. Of making a difference.