“Shit.”

A sec­ond later, I realised I’d actu­ally said that. I hadn’t meant for it to escape my lips, it was intended merely as a thought, but I guess the stress of the mis­sion had finally started get­ting to me. Out in the field, it was easy to con­trol – your stress, your adren­a­line, was what you sur­vived on. But after it was all over, back in the camp, it finally all caught up with you. Nor­mally, that was fine and good and expected. Not today, though.

These peo­ple weren’t my supe­ri­ors, cer­tainly none of them was the cap­tain that I was used to report­ing to after a mis­sion. We stood for a moment, siz­ing each other up, before what looked like their leader spoke.

“Matthew Church, please come with me.”

So say­ing, he turned and walked into the back room, fol­lowed by his two friends. I stood, stunned, for a few seconds.

I should prob­a­bly explain – the man, who­ever he might be, had just called me by name. My full name. My sur­name wasn’t some­thing I told peo­ple. I guess the Church must have a record of the name they’d given me some­where, but they should be the only ones. Not since leav­ing there had I used my full name; not even the army knew it. I was just Matthew.

Some­thing about the fact that they seemed to know so much trig­gered a strange and obscure part of my mind and I felt com­pelled to fol­low them, at least to find out how much they knew and how they knew it.

Inside the tiny back room, I found the three of them sit­ting silently behind a mahogany desk that occu­pied most of the avail­able space. In front of it, there was one rick­ety wooden chair. I shot it a with­er­ing gaze, and turned to my three… interviewers.

Their eyes were fixed firmly on me in a most unnerv­ing fashion.

I sat.

“Mis­ter Matthew Church, for­merly an orphan in the care of Romira, pupil of the Church of Ari­mor from 1687 to 1691, and a mem­ber of the army’s elite scout­ing reg­i­ment since 1694. I am correct?”

I wasn’t quite sure whether that was meant to be a ques­tion or not, but either way I nod­ded. It was, after all, per­fectly correct.

“Recently dis­patched on a mis­sion to dis­cover enemy posi­tions approx­i­mately 20 miles to the south­west,” he con­tin­ued. “You tracked and caught up with what you assumed to be an enemy scout patrol, but lis­ten­ing in to their con­ver­sa­tion revealed a rather dif­fer­ent truth, did it not?”

I con­sid­ered my response for a moment, before giv­ing in to the nag­ging feel­ing. “How do you know that?” I asked.

“Eyes and ears, Mis­ter Church. Now, if you will let me continue?”

I was silent.

“Thank you. Now, I believe I shall tell you some­thing that you do not already know. The group you inter­cepted, and who were respon­si­ble for the deaths of the rest of your party, were mem­bers of a shady organ­i­sa­tion known as the Mahandin. Lit­tle known out­side of Tuborg, I’m afraid, hence the some­what vacant look now grac­ing your eyes. They have recently begun to move here in Xan­ten, and their involve­ment with cer­tain groups within Dar­ra­son is suspected.

“They, and their accom­plices, are a dan­ger not only to our coun­try and its polit­i­cal sta­bil­ity, but to the state of our soci­ety as a whole.”

I inter­rupted.

“Look, inter­est­ing as this is, you seem to know far more about these peo­ple than I. What’s the pur­pose of this?”

The man, still the only one of the three to have spo­ken, sighed and stood.

“Mis­ter Church, we are offer­ing you a choice.”

“A choice?” I replied.

“Yes. The infor­ma­tion you over­heard from these peo­ple is dan­ger­ous infor­ma­tion indeed – infor­ma­tion, we believe, con­cern­ing their forth­com­ing activ­i­ties in Dar­ra­son. We only know gen­er­al­i­ties, you now know specifics. Specifics that we need to know. This puts us in an awk­ward posi­tion, but a posi­tion that we are expe­ri­enced in deal­ing with. Your choice, Mis­ter Church, is between accept­ing a job and walk­ing away from the whole affair right now.”

“A job? Who are you? Why are you offer­ing me a job? Why shouldn’t I refuse?”

“We are rep­re­sen­ta­tives of an organ­i­sa­tion known as the DDB. The gath­er­ing of infor­ma­tion, and the use of such to pro­tect our coun­try, is our busi­ness. We believe you have skills that would be use­ful to us.”

One of his presumably-subordinates pushed a piece of paper across the desk towards me.

“This is the signed and stamped form con­cern­ing your hon­ourable dis­charge from the army. Should you, of course, accept our offer. The pay is gen­er­ous, the job excit­ing, and pro­mo­tion a dis­tinct possibility.”

“You’re mak­ing it sound awfully like a busi­ness, and I’m no busi­ness­man. What hap­pens if I say no?”

“I tear up this form. You go back to the army, explain to your cap­tain why three good men were lost from your patrol with­out you hav­ing encoun­tered the enemy.”

“What? But we did encounter the enemy! Or some secret guer­rilla group, what­ever they really were.”

“If you turn down our offer, you did not encounter them. Every­thing you know con­cern­ing that event stays firmly inside your head. Let any­thing slip to any­one, and… Just remem­ber, our eyes and ears have cross­bows too.”

“Oh,” I replied. I’d sus­pected from the start that it would be this kind of inter­view, but there’d seemed lit­tle other choice than to go along with it. In truth, there was lit­tle alter­na­tive even now. They must have known how dis­tant I kept myself from the army; that I had noth­ing to lose by leav­ing it. Besides, I was a prac­ti­cal man, and I’d had enough expe­ri­ence to know that in most sit­u­a­tions the appro­pri­ate path to fol­low was the one of least poten­tial danger.

I stood.

“I’m in,” I said, and we shook hands.

And so it began.