His stock is on the rise in the underbelly. Dreamshare has only broken free from the confines of military experimentation in the last eight months. The possibilities, the advantageous, the profit seem endless but fortunately for Arthur it only takes one job for clients to learn who not to turn towards. A bad reputation travels as swiftly as rats.
So do the rules and limitations of PASIV technology. It only takes two jobs before Arthur no longer has to field improbable expectations. No, you can’t implant a memory. No, you can’t implant an idea. This is subtle technique; a game of observation and extraction. They’re not miracle workers. They’re just a different class of thieves.
The human mind is far too vast and not fully understood to bother entertaining flights of spectacular fancy. Too many variables, all unknown and contradictory.
A point man can make or break a job like nothing else. Faulty information is more than one nail in a coffin. Arthur excels in the role. Thus far he’s worked jobs for the Yakuza, a militant group in Cuba and the Chechen mafia.
He’s transitioning to dirty politicians and big wigs eager for the leg up competitors.
His current employer is neither of those types. Arthur is in Bhutan, nursing a knife to the shoulder and working for a woman named Talia al Ghul. She’s not a politician though she has that air about her, of formidability and sharp command presence. She offered Arthur a job in person after pulling him out of an interrogation cell in Rome; cuffs still slick with blood where they’d torn his wrists. Arthur’s skin had been a mess of dried blood, mottled yellow and purple bruises - didn’t faze her in the least.
“Mr. Arthur,” she’d said by way of introduction, stepping over corpses and putting a knife in the throat of his former client, “I’m assembling a team and I’m told you’re the best point there is.”
And as Talia watched, cool and impassive while a doctor tended to Arthur’s wounds in a helicopter, she finished, “Don’t disappoint me.”
He didn’t.
Now was his second job under her employment. The first job she had been Vivien Amin, heiress to an oil industry in South Sudan. Now she is Talia, leader of a militant society with a base in the Himalayas. Arthur’s the only member of the team permitted to meet her there. He’s also the only one who knows her name.
She’d seemed pleased enough with his first extraction that, as Arthur was leaving team headquarters, she finally told him her true name.
“You may call me Talia, next time.”
Arthur never told her he’d learned it before the end of the first job.
He suspects she knew; how else would the source he’d dug through countless false leads and paid a hefty price for this knowledge have turned up dead the very day he flew out of Sudan?
Vivien Amin was a different kind of forgery, deeper than a guise or persona. Talia wears identities exactly as a spy should. As if they are a fine first layer of skin. Not unlike the deceptively subdued yet striking suit he at times dons to lend clients a false sense of ease. All too often one only needs to look just approachable or intimidating enough for clients to talk themselves out of their own suspicions.
Each of Talia’s forgeries are fine art; studies in subtlety. Without Arthur’s years spent grifting, if not for the keen eye his profession demands; his suspicions may have laid untouched as well during that first job.
And Talia is lovely. Lovely in the way those first droplets of rainfall after months of drought are. Like the high of walking away from a shootout with only flesh wounds.
Arthur knows well; she is also every bit as lethal.
* big thanks to grizzly-bear-bane who helped me settle on a time frame for this and beta'd as well!
