Chapter 6
When Koksun woke up again, he didn’t feel quite as bad as he did before. A lot of the pain that had previously been pulsing throughout his body seemed to have dissipated, although whether it was gone entirely or just not aware yet that the body it had invaded was now awake again and ready to be tortured some more he was not sure.
What he did know was that it had been replaced with something. A craving. Something much unlike anything he had ever before thought worthy of the word. His mind drifted back briefly to one day when he was a homeless eight-year-old, still a full four years away from that fateful encounter where his prowess at pickpocketing caught the propitious attention of a Varco recruiter, who decided this young street runt just might have what it takes to a member in the ranks of the country’s elite spy and assassin organization.
He had only been recently orphaned, and while picking pockets would one day become as effortless to him as walking along a sidewalk, it was at that time still a craft of which he knew nothing. He had gone two weeks without a meal and was traipsing through a well-to-do part of the city when he saw a child about his own age seated with his parents and siblings with a large ice cream cone in his hands.
Still not accustomed to using thievery, much less violence, to acquire what he needed, Koksun had simply stood there in a near trance, wishing, wishing, and wishing he were that boy seated there surrounded by family and enjoying the sugary delights of a heavenly treat such as that. The desire became so strong he could almost feel his soul exit his body, travel through the air, enter the body of the young child, and begin licking and sucking on that delicious treat. His stomach growled. His body shook. His look must have been discomforting because the father of the family turned and faced him and said, “Beat it, street worm!”
Beat it, he did. He found the most recondite corner of an abandoned alley that he could and stayed there for hours, still in a trance-like state, the full reality of his desperate plight sinking in, and it was then and there he realized he was going to have to take what he wanted in this life if he was going to survive.
It had been a life-changing moment, after which he had begun burglarizing, pickpocketing, and, on occasion, robbing in order to get what he needed, and he had always considered it one of the most powerful emotional experiences in his life, one he had never expected to be surpassed in importance.
But, to his immense shock, he realized at this very moment that it had been, and that the craving he now felt for the small pile of pungent-smelling, finely ground green powder made the aforementioned childhood experience seem tame by comparison. He looked at it. It captivated his eyes. It seemed to almost drag him towards it, for he knew that one sniff and he would be restored to his recent godlike state.
He asked himself how long the craving would be this unbearable. He calculated that, since the detox period was two weeks, more likely than not after the first week the worst of the physical pain and unbearable cravings would be behind.
Just six and a half more days to go then! an inner voice told him cheerily, and he found its optimistic tone sadistically mocking rather than encouraging. He began to wonder if the reason the Valder was placed right there by the door was really for the protection of the recruits. On the one hand, it seemed at least feasible, given the hell his mind and body were going through right now, that the detoxification period could be so overwhelming that a man could die from it.
But, on the other hand, he wondered why the death of a recruit would matter to the Varco if failure meant expulsion anyway. Why not just let the weak recruits die, while the survivors would be forced to endure the agony?
Then the thought occurred to him that that would not reflect the reality of actual missions. On an actual mission, they would have the Valder in their pockets and would have to exercise self-restraint. Thus, this was going to reveal who had not only the physical strength to survive the withdrawal but also the mental strength to consciously resist the solution.
Given the strength of the hold this drug had already revealed itself to have taken on his mind after just five days, he realized the instructor was taking him to the brink of full-blown addiction. Those who set off the alarm would reveal themselves as beyond that brink.
(and what kind of a Varco agent would a drug addict make?)
No agent at all.
Touch that powder, and you’re dead, a voice told him. Forget about expulsion.
The truth of this subconscious revelation was self-evident the moment it asserted itself. While he wasn’t sure what had happened with those rejected early on in the Varco program, long before they had been turned into physical and psychological weapons far too dangerous to be permitted anywhere other than under the close watch of the Varco, he had felt intuitively over the last year that failure in this program meant death.
With this particular issue, however, he felt not even the smallest trace of doubt. The notion that the government would permit a highly trained human weapon to walk the streets of Metinvur with no thought in his mind other than his next sniff of Valder was laughable. Such a man would assassinate, blackmail, bribe, and do whatever else it took to find access to this substance, which would then probably start to make its way into the general populace, and the thought of that made him shudder.
Criminals under the influence of this substance would be formidable opponents for regular police to deal with, and the Varco was designed for international espionage missions and counterintelligence, not domestic law enforcement. Yet, for anyone other than the Varco to take on a criminal organization using this substance made him shudder. Not only would their ferocity in combat be unprecedented but so would their desperate, unpredictable nature.
Furthermore, he couldn’t fathom that the Varco would even permit the risk of word spreading of their secret substance, even if they didn’t fear the expelled agent would himself directly be seeking to obtain it.
A chill settled upon the back of his neck and ears as the resolution of this issue became firmly settled. For the first time in his Varco training, he found himself truly doubting whether he was going to survive.