Chapter 1

"Today is the first day of the rest of your life."
-C. Dederich

It was surprising that, instead of removing me from operations and transferring me to intelligence or teaching, they simply cut me loose. They allowed me to leave the Compound that I had lived in for fourteen years for the first time -- excluding training missions -- and to begin my new life. The process of leaving took quite a long time. After going through countless debriefings, they blindfolded me, drove me off the Compound, and took me to an airfield. There, I was loaded into a small jet and flown to three different airports before arriving at my final destination. After disembarking from the plane, I was loaded into car, and in less than a half an hour, the car pulled into a garage. Guided from the car, they took me into the house that attached to the garage and helped me to a seat. I waited fifteen minutes, as I had been instructed to, before I removed my blindfold.

I sat in a kitchen -- actually, starting that day, my kitchen. I chuckled to myself, because the layout was exactly like House Nine at the Compound. A section of the Compound had a neighborhood set up for training exercises, and this kitchen matched the one there almost perfectly. I guessed that my new home was one of the government's safe houses. I did not even have to look any further to know the exact layout of the house. I began to wonder if the government constructed House Nine to match their safe houses, or if they just reused architectural floor plans to save money. I just hope that not all of their safe houses were exactly the same; part of the problem with the government was that they would sometimes sacrifice safety over money.

Two things stood out in my kitchen that separated it from House Nine: One, the walls did not appear to have any traces of bullet damage; something that House Nine had plenty of. The second thing was the dossier that contained my new life laying on the table.

The clock on the wall read 4:25. I did some quick calculations and guessed that I must have been in the Pacific Standard Time Zone. Even with all the precautions that the Agency took to make sure that I could not backtrack to them -- placing me in an isolation cell fifty-two hours before the debriefings, the blindfold, traveling at night -- I still had a good idea of where the Compound was located. After all, they trained me my entire life for circumstances like the one I was currently in.

Though, I figured that a quicker way to discover where I was would be to open the dossier.

The dossier contained my legend, a false biography for deep-cover work: birth certificate, set of keys, identification card, passport, couple of credit cards, ATM card, checkbook, wallet containing five hundred dollars, emancipation papers, and other miscellaneous papers that I would need for my new life. My last name was now 'Johnson' and my birthday was February 13th. Since I was unaware of when my real birthday was, that day should work as well as any other day. I was able to switch my identification card to a driver's license in about five months when I turned sixteen. The deed for the house stated that I lived on 1342 Evergreen Drive in Central City, California. I had to think for a moment to recall any information I had on Central City. It was located along the central coast of California, its population was around thirty thousand, and it was mostly a service city -- it catered to tourists that came there for the beach.

I put the identification card, credit cards, and ATM card into the wallet and gathered up the contents of the dossier. As I left the kitchen, I decided that I should at least turn on the lights as I made my way back to the master bedroom. It was a good thing that I did, since the living room and hallway contained empty moving boxes. At least the government went through the charade that I had just moved in.

I wondered how the neighbors would take to a lone teenager living next to them?

Inside the master bedroom, I found a few surprises. On the bed sat a brand new Gateway M675XL laptop computer. Also, the computer desk in the corner of the room actually had a working computer hooked up to it, along with a cable modem, wireless router, and docking station for the laptop. I tossed the dossier package on the desk along with the wallet and house keys. A grin spread across my face when I turned on the computer monitor and saw that BitComet was running and already downloading and seeding several anime that I had yet to acquire. Now I knew where Bob had gone before I entered the isolation cell. Bob was a fellow agent, whose specialty was computers. He knew that I enjoyed Japanese anime, and I would have bet the $500 that was in my wallet that one of the hard drives in the computer had my favorite series.

I turned off the monitor and stripped out of my clothes, then went to one of the two walk-in closets in the master bathroom to discover that most of the wardrobe that I had at left at the Compound was there, along with some additional clothing. I guess the rest was in the dresser in the bedroom. At least the government was smart enough to figure out that somebody snooping around would be suspicious of anyone who only owned new clothes.

I went back into the master bedroom and noticed there was a picture on the bedside table with my 'parents' and me that was taken three years ago. The Clandestine Youth Agency tried to make sure everything was covered for its agents, including cover stories that would stand up to the most intense background checks. That included photos of us at different ages and stages in life. The adults that were with me in the picture were instructors from the Compound. Their features were altered in such a way that they could pass for my parents. The fact that I was an orphan and raised my entire life by a government Agency would be much harder to believe when there was 'proof' like pictures.

I turned off the lights and crawled into the king-sized bed, naked. Even before I had fully lain down, I felt it. The good mood that I started to feel left me rapidly as I reached between the mattresses to withdraw a Glock 17. I knew from the weight that it was fully loaded. I checked, and sure enough, there was a blank in the chamber as well as a blank in the clip, followed by standard 9 mm ammo. Even though it was unmarked, I knew it was my personal one, its balance and sighting custom-tailored for me. I had left it back at the Compound, swearing that I would never see it again. The Agency knew I was now a pacifist and had no need for anything whose sole purpose was to take life. Maybe they thought I was going through a phase and that is why they were willing to let me walk away from the Agency.

I quickly stripped down the weapon in the dark and placed the parts on the bedside table next to the family photo. I then drifted off to sleep.

I awoke six hours later, feeling somewhat refreshed. My stomach growled, reminding me that I had not eaten anything since I left the Compound. I made my way over to the window to open the blackout curtains. They were quite effective, because the room was pitch black. After I opened them, I quickly slipped into a sweat suit and headed to the kitchen, pausing along the way to open the remaining blackout curtains. The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator were fully stocked with both standard staples and perishables, I discovered. I debated if I should eat a protein bar or make myself a decent breakfast. Since it was my first day of freedom, I decided that I might as well go all out. I made myself a Denver omelet, hash browns, toast, and a large glass of orange juice. I was glad that there was a juicer, since I would not want to have done it by hand. Forcing myself to eat slowly, I savored the taste instead following my usual practice of devouring meals quickly. After finishing breakfast, I went ahead and cleaned up after myself. After drying all of the dishes and oiling the cast-iron skillet I had used, I headed back to the master bedroom.

I grabbed the laptop that was still lying on the bed and booted it up. It appeared that the laptop had been already configured with the wireless server. After disabling the laptop's wireless connection, I opened up the encrypted file that would contain my legend and information I would need to know for my new life. Glancing at the right bottom corner of the screen to note the time, it took me about ten seconds to figure out the key I would need to open the file. After typing out the 47-character alphanumeric key, I waited until the time changed to 11:54 before hitting enter. I let out a sigh of relief as the file opened up. If I had entered the wrong key, then the file would have deleted itself and unleashed a virus in the computer, as well as sent off a warning message the next time the computer had accessed the Internet. I had two minutes to read the entire contents of the file before it would delete itself. Since I had been trained to speed read and had a near-photographic memory, I read it twice just to make sure I had everything committed. I watched the file delete itself while I went over some of the details I had just read in my head.

My parents, Dwayne and Linda Johnson, were jetsetters. Linda was a computer programmer who had been able to cash in on the computer boom of the 1990s. She had cashed out before the bubble burst, and she and her husband decided to travel the world. They decided to travel with their daughter, Cindy, and let me attend high school, something that I had not done because up to now I had been home-schooled. I had been emancipated to make life easier for me. There were a savings and a checking account set up at a local credit union, and it already possessed my signature card. A thousand dollars would be automatically deposited monthly into my savings account. The PIN numbers for the ATM card and credit cards were 1701.

I was sure Alan must have had a hand in coming up with my background. Alan was a fellow agent whose passion was everything Star Trek. I felt slightly sad that I might never see any of the agents that I had trained with again. We had been taught that personal attachment was dangerous because it could affect a mission when one of your teammates was captured or killed. But that did not stop kinships from developing.

I enabled the wireless connection and launched the Firefox web browser. Bob even had my startup page set up to mirKx, a site that indexes Anime and Manga BitTorrents. I saw there were a few titles that I did not have, so I went ahead and selected them. I decided I might as well save them to the laptop, so that I could access them when I was on the go. I hooked up the laptop to the docking station on the computer desk, and I went to the living room.

When I saw that there was a 50" high-definition plasma TV screen mounted on the wall above the pellet stove, I decided that I should fully explore the house to see what other surprises there might be. The entertainment rack contained a sound system, DISH satellite receiver, a DVD recorder, and a Gateway Media Center PC. I grabbed the TV remote and turned on the plasma. I had to grab a different remote to turn on the satellite receiver, and after a while, I found out besides the regular channels, it also had a wide range of international channels, including some in a few languages that I had not mastered yet. I tuned into JapanTV and looked around the rest of the room. It appeared that my DVD collection had followed me here, as well, because they were in a bookcase. I decided that I should take a full tour, so I went to the front door.

I started at the foyer and looked right through the archway: it lead to the dining room. The thing that stood out in that room was the large table surrounded by twelve chairs. I checked out the study to the left of the foyer, and just about everything that I thought I had abandoned at the Compound had migrated into there. From there, instead of going back to the living room, I cut through the study into the hallway that went to the master bedroom. There was a bathroom and two bedrooms flanking the hallway. I paused at one of the bedrooms to find it contained furniture and décor that would match a female teenager. I guessed that would be my sister's room, and wondered if a real one would be joining me. I was the first agent to leave the Agency, so maybe they were just being prepared in case another decided to leave as well