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The house creaked, a phone rang, and murmurs and flashing lights surrounded the perimeter. This had been my estranged uncle’s routine every week since his unexpected suicide six weeks prior.
“Unexpected, yes,” I recall the lieutenant telling me as a team of agents documented the scene, “but not unheard of in your Uncle’s line of work, son.”
“Still, it’s hard to believe,” I sigh, surveying the scene. “Poor, Uncle Jim.” He sat, slumped back in his leather desk chair, gray matter dripping from an exit wound on his forehead down unto his polo shirt. A .45 was dropped in his lap.
No one in the family knew exactly what Jim did for the government, only that he’d been recruited after a stint in the Navy Seals and had become more and more withdrawn over time. The lieutenant declined to offer any additional insight.
To sum the next few weeks, I inherited both his brownstone in the city and the laptop, found under a loose hearthstone in the study. The death that had never seemed quite right had become increasingly stranger given the odd things I had seen and heard and which appeared to have been perpetrated by what I came to believe was Uncle Jim’s restless spirit.
I sat in the newly reupholstered chair and watched the stream of text—
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As the murmurs and lights continued to flash, louder, faster and closer. The phone kept ringing, too. It was somewhere nearby. That was a new detail. I searched around the study and at last tracked the noise to an old cell phone secured in a false panel under the desk. I flipped it open and after a hesitation hit the answer button.
When I put it to my ear I was met with a hollow voice that was unmistakably Uncle Jim’s.
“Operation Dante’s Gate is a success.” Then nothing—
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The lights and noises outside, however, reached a crescendo, as suddenly a squad of operative in balaclavas and battle armor came crashing in through the windows around me. The first through crunched through the broken glass and pointed a black pistol at me. And in the next half-second, I heard the expected poot poot of a silencer followed by two holes opening in my chest. As I collapsed I was able to see the masked man scoop up Jim’s laptop and a second agent enter with a red gas can. As I drifted off into the darkness, I could hear them rummaging the desk and dousing the place.
“Russians. Sleeper agents, no doubt,” Uncle Jim later explained to me unholstering his phone, they never leave a witness behind. Or so they think.
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