The results of a daydream...this stemmed from real events, which is why my name is the same as the main character!

A Spy Tale


“Carl! Hey, do you remember me?”
The young woman skidded to a stop in front of me, receiving glares from the hurried passengers around her. What on earth was she doing!? I definitely recognized her from my singles ward during this last summer. I accidentally gave her a flying tackle in the middle of a mad rush to catch the flying disc in a heated game of Ultimate Frisbee. They were going to see her talking to me and I was pretty sure I had been made only moments ago.
“Uh, I don’t think we’ve ever met.”
“Sure we did! It was last summer during the Ultimate game.”Dang it. She remembered too many details. The only way to get her to leave, and consequently keep her from the men following me, was to be mean. I hated to do it; she was a very nice girl and took my tackle really well. Even covered in sweat with her curly blonde hair flying around she was pretty. Plus she was one of the nicest girls I’d ever met. But it was for her good.
I gathered my courage and said, “No. We’ve never met,” in as disdainful a manner as I could muster.
She flushed and looked at the floor, stammering apologies and hurrying away. Feigning gratitude to have gotten rid of her I hastily made my way to the exit and prayed she would be delivered from suspicion.



I walked into my apartment just as the phone started ringing. Hurrying to set down my small sack of groceries and briefcase I picked up the receiver and barked a breathless greeting.
“Carl Murdock?” it was a deep voice without a trace of humor, which I found highly disconcerting.
“Uh,who’s asking?”
“Are you Carl Murdock?” the voice insisted.
“What do you want, man?”
“There’s someone who would like to speak with you.” Some shuffling ensued while the phone was obviously handed to someone else. I heard a small gasp and whispered instructions before a woman’s voice came through the line.
“Carl?”
I cursed under my breath, which I never do, by the way, and decided to pretend I didn’t know what was going on.
“Uh, who is this?”
“Um… we don’t know each other, but these men seem to think we do. I mistook you for someone else in the train station today and, um, that’s all I guess.”
Although she seemed fairly steady I heard a tremor in her voice near the end and knew it was her. Just for clarification, I asked, “What is your name?”
There was some hesitation on the line and a gruff voice ordering her to respond, then I heard her whisper, “Brittany.”


“David I have to do something. You don’t understand. This girl has nothing to do with any of this, but she is stuck in the middle. She’s not the kind of girl that will deal with those kind of men very well. She’s…innocent. She doesn’t understand any of this.”
“She’s a casualty.”
“No. She is my responsibility. I got her into this mess and I will be the one to find her and make it right. Let me go.”
“Carl, I just can’t spare you right now. I’ll send O’Shae or Sullivan. They can handle it just fine.”
“O’Shae or Sullivan,” I muttered as I paced back and forth in front of the desk. “They’re as bad as the men she’s already with! There’s a reason they weren’t assigned to this task in the first place!”
“Murdock, you are not going. I have another assignment for you.”
“My current assignment is unfinished, Chief. I respectfully request permission to finish it.”
“You blew it, Carl. They made you. I know it hasn’t happened in a long time but something happened and you aren’t safe on that mission anymore If you see those men you run the other way, do you hear me?”
“I hear you. I have no other option?”
“No. No other option, Carl,” the older man said with a trace of sorrow. “Everyone gets to choose their actions. You know that. Unfortunately sometimes people use that agency to put themselves in danger.” He looked at his hands and heaved a heavy sigh. “Sometimes we can’t do anything to help them.”
“Sir?” David shook his head and looked out the window. “Sir I must respectfully resign from the agency if you will not allow me to finish this mission.”
“Don’t do this Carl,” he warned.
“I must, David. She’s an innocent…” when David started to protest my comment I cut him off with, “She. Is. An. Innocent. She is probably the most innocent woman I have yet to encounter.”
“Carl, I have to ask you; is this personal?”
Although his question caught me off guard, I was able to honestly reply, “No, Dave. This is not personal. I just have to do it.”
“Sure you won’t change your mind?”
“I’m sure.” Feeling the need, I added in a whisper, “I have to go Dave. I just have to.”
Shaking his head and opening a drawer in his desk he pulled out a memo sheet and began writing on it.
“Carl Jonathan Murdock, I hereby sentence you to sixty days of inactivity for…” he looked me straight in the eye and finished, “personal reasons. Is that time adequate?”
“Yes, sir. More than adequate.”
After signing the sabbatical notice he reached into his desk once more and handed me a small card with a series of rotating numbers displayed on a small screen.
“Access codes?”
“Yes. Sometimes people gain access to important information in mysterious ways. Sometimes it helps when you’re trying to find things. Dismissed.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Good luck, Carl.”
I nodded as I slipped out the door and prayed I had made the right decision. The only thing I knew for sure was that she was my responsibility and that her capture was on me. I had to make it right and hope no lasting damage had been done.
Locating a subject that didn’t want to be found was very difficult but not impossible. These men obviously wanted me to find them because they called and let me know they had taken Brittany. If they only wanted to scare me they would have killed her and left her somewhere I would find her.
I punched in a phone number and asked for Rebecca. After a short pause she came on the phone, saying, “This is Rebecca.”
“Becca, I need you to trace a number for me; off the record.”
“Carl, what are you up to?”
“Becca,” I scolded, “you know if I tell you I’ll have to kill you.”
“Right, right, I know. Okay, what’s the number?”
“Mine.”
“Yours?”
“Mine.” Sensing hesitation on her end I added, “Please don’t ask me questions, Becca. Just do it? It’s important.”
She hesitated a moment and I could picture her furrowing her brow, adjusting her black-framed glasses, and looking around to see if anyone was looking. I wondered when she was going to figure out she had the whole place to herself. She didn’t have any colleagues (because no one could keep up with her) and people rarely stopped by to chat (because she usually ended up explaining to them why they had no idea how to do their job).
“Okay, Carl, but if I get caught it’s on you.”
Chuckling, I said, “Becca, you never get caught. That’s probably the reason they fired everyone else that used to work there. They got caught but you never do.”
“Whatever. Those people got fired because they were stupid and didn’t know what they were doing.” There was a short pause and I wondered if she had hung up the phone.
“Bec, you there?”
“Gimme a sec! I’m not rerouting traffic for you or anything! It takes some time!”
I waited.
“Okay, your mom called about an hour ago, your landlord twenty minutes ago, and… your mom again about three-and-a-half minutes ago.”
“Becca, I need you to go back farther than that. I need to know about a call made yesterday evening around ten twenty-five.”
“Bingo. Holy cow.”
“What?”
“Someone has some major equipment and doesn’t want you finding them.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The signal was bounced off every tower between here and New Zealand. It’s gonna take me awhile to figure out what is going on.”
“Call me back.”
“Right.”
While I was waiting for Becca to call back I started packing a travel bag, but realized I didn’t know where I was going. I couldn’t stand to just sit around waiting, so I laid out a stack of warm weather clothes and a set of cold weather clothes so I could leave as soon as I knew where I was headed. After that was all done I booted up my computer and signed on to the agency’s database to gather information about not only the suspected abductors, but also their abductee. Just the thought of her being caught in the middle of this made me want to break something. Fortunately for me I had long since disposed of all easily breakable items in my apartment for that exact reason. It was too expensive to keep buying picture frames and dinner glasses whenever I lost control.

The man suspected of heading this group of criminals is called “Big J” by his subordinates. His full name is John Williams, but having his full name doesn’t really get us anywhere. He is so slippery and his operations so efficiently run we have yet to pin him down to a specific location he may use as a headquarters. Although with technology the way it is I think he didn’t have a physical headquarters, but instead directed his people from all over the world. All we know about him is what his rather large file in the criminal justice system tells. Unfortunately the concrete information in this file is limited to his small-time dealings from the time he was fifteen when he stole a car to a series of high-profile robberies when he was thirty-two for which he was never apprehended. The crimes between escalated in gravity as well as visibility as he got older, but until he went off radar at thirty-two there wasn’t a whisper of human collateral on any of his jobs. He blew up cars, empty buildings, and held people at gunpoint, but he never took them from the scene or followed through with his threats of injury. Whatever he had been exposed to in his more recent years had caused him to deviate from his normal behavior and begin dealing in people.
Big J had a pretty big crew in light of our inability to find him. Every once in awhile we would nab one of his boys, but they always broke out of jail before we could get anything valuable out of them. The guys at the office weren’t big into torture so we didn’t usually get anything useful from them even if they did stick around for lengthy interrogations. Big J’s muscle was a six-foot-three three-hundred-pound gorilla named Albert Jones. Albert wasn’t high on the intelligence scale, but he more than made up for that with his ability to heft midsize cars above his head. Riley Anderson took care of J’s intelligence operations and anything that needed to be done on a computer. Riley was so good at what he did we were unable to gather much information on him at all. We only knew his name because Becca was able to capture some information in a dark corner of cyber space. He’s a gloater. Every once in awhile Becca will get a haughty email with a request for her to admit he’s better than her. Personally, I don’t believe this is true. Becca has come up with some pretty amazing information from nothing. Once I brought in a computer that had been in a building I blew up on accident. She found the user information and locations of hits which led to the capture of a terrorist ring working out of an abandoned mine shaft in Uzbekistan.