Closed RP in the Little Green Apple

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

It was possible that when he finally turned mortal, John Amsterdam would drop dead from centuries of smoking.

Smoking had been a recreational activity well before the European settlers had arrived, and it had spread through the colonies like wildfire. John had picked up the habit at fourteen, right off the boat. He had tried to give it up like drinking, but had only succeeded in cutting back. Besides, a guy as great as him needed a few bad habits. So he indulged in his habit now, trying not to think of anything besides the smoke curling over his head.

Comments

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

John pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and set it on the table. It didn't work here, and even if it did, he was certain that he wasn't going to get any important phone calls. Only one number had really had any meaning, and he'd deleted it out of the address book. But the phone itself felt so familiar riding in his pocket that he hadn't been able to wean himself from it yet.

"Don't feel bad," he said. "Twenty years ago, this would have been impossible. You certainly aren't the only person who doesn't get them. My friend Omar, he's sixty-five, and he still needs help with his phone."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

"I'm not sure that makes me feel better," he replied with a chuckle. "It's not that I can't see their usefulness. I can recall many a situation from my youth when any one of these gizmos would have been a godsend. It's just mastering the software that's giving me a headache."

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

"Yeah." His face turned dark. "I imagine that if we'd had a few of these, we wouldn't have been the Lost Battalion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Battalion_%28World_War_I%29), for starters." The past was the past, though, and he shrugged it off. "But if you have the time and a healthy dose of masochism, any modern teenager should be able to explain it to you."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

"My thoughts exactly. Although you'd still have had a problem with encryption, just as we did with radio contact - the Germans had quite the ear for things the Allies didn't want them to hear." He picked up John's phone and flipped it open. "That's a camera lens, of course, and won't these things transmit photos to other phones more or less instantly? That would've come in handy when I stole the Naval gun plans from the Hamburg shipyards."

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

He nodded. "You can record video with them now, too. I did a stint with the CIA, and it would have made the job a lot easier." If he'd had a working computer, he could have shown the dead spy Google, and the wonders of the internet. "The only problem is that now, they've got these earpieces that fit over the ear, and they're about the size of my thumb. It makes it hard to tell who's on the phone, and who's just a garden-variety kook."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

Reilly laughed. "Exactly my reaction the first time I went out to modern London! Even the ones with little boxes in their hands looked barking mad to me." He paused for a sip of his drink, a nicely aged apple brandy.

"I did a stint with the FBI - a short one, the Fifth Column was sunk in too deep there for me to do much good - but the CIA's after my time. I'm trying to catch up by reading, but, well, they keep redacting all the good parts. What did you get up to for them?"

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

"Well, that depends. Are you asking about what I was supposed to be doing for them, or what I actually was doing for them?" Or both, most likely.

"Tell you what. I'll trade you, story for a story."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

Reilly's eyebrow arched. "What do you think?" And he nodded. "Fair enough. Shall we flip for who goes first?"

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

John shook his head. "Nah, that's okay. I've got plenty of stories. I'll go first."

He took another puff from the hookah. "So you're read up on the Cold War, right? What I was supposed to be doing was helping spy on the Russians. I'd get pages and pages of documents, raw info that had to be boiled down so that people could use it. What I was actually doing was spying on my superiors. With a brand-new agency like this, every country wanted an in. So I kept tabs on my boss."

Another puff. "Now, I don't think the perfect spy is supposed to turn around and blackmail the person they're watching, instead of being a good citizen and handing over the information to the higher-ups. But I'd hint just enough that maybe I'd turn him in, and he'd pay me under the table. Then I'd tell the boss' boss that he was doing something suspicious, but not enough to be sure."

John shrugged. "It was a lucrative ten years, I'll say that."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

"Ahh yes, when is it ever not a glorified version of office politics, this game?" Reilly took another sip of brandy. "I faced a similar problem in my time with the FBI. I would identify emigres I knew to be Bolsheviks; they would be taken away to be interrogated, often by knuckle-dragging Klansmen, even though I'd forbidden my subordinates to hire them; and somehow they'd always wind up too badly injured - or killed - in the course of the 'interrogation' to tell anything too useful."

He took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled. "It seemed the harder I tried to get the Bureau to fight the Bolsheviks, the more roadblocks my superiors put in front of me. It wasn't long before I went home, to put a stick in their spokes my own way."

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

Lacking a drink, John got up quickly and got a glass of sparkling water. The multi-colored bubbles were always a nice touch. "Have you ever gotten out of the spy business?" he asked when he got back. "I was a comic for a while, after the CIA."

John hesitated, then added, "I was terrible at it, too. After a job like that, I wasn't really cut out for humor."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

"No, no, on some level or another I was always a spy. I wanted - I needed to be a player at the big table. I made and lost fortunes, worked at cover jobs, some of them quite interesting. But I always had an agenda running alongside, either MI-5's or my own or both."

He puffed on his cigarette again, tipped the ashes into a silver ashtray. "Take my trip to Paris in '04. Officially I was there chasing my wayward wife. Unofficially I was there to weasel oil concessions out of the Australian land baron D'Arcy, under the noses of the Rothschilds, who were wooing him intensely. Which I did, quite dashingly if I say so myself - I got on board the Rothschild's yacht by disguising myself as a priest. The deception couldn't last, of course, but I'd managed to drive a substantial wedge between D'Arcy and the Rothschilds' plans before I got tossed out, and he came to us. From there it was simply a matter of getting the papers signed and delivered before they could catch up to us."

Reilly gazed into middle distance. "Even more unofficially, I was in Paris to see my sister Anna. For years I'd let her believe me dead; it was how I made my escape from home as a boy. It was undoubtedly not wise, but - can you imagine what that was like, having the chance to see someone I had loved in another life again?"

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

((Not dead!))

"I haven't tried being a priest yet," John said. "Being celibate would be a serious detriment to my goals in life." Although some of the nuns he'd met looked pretty good, even in a habit. It probably wasn't worth spending his afterlife in Hell, though.

He waggled the end of his hookah back and forth. "You know, not that long ago, I ran into a woman I used to date. She was a painter. She did some of the most beautiful murals you'll ever see in New York. And let me tell you, she had one hell of a face, too. Beautiful girl. When I saw her last, she was in her eighties. It's a good thing I went by Charlie back then, or it would have been awkward."

John frowned. "But I get the feeling that your meeting was intentional. Mine usually aren't."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

Reilly shrugged. "Up to a certain point it was - my plan was to watch her from afar, make sure she was well and happy, and got spotted. Accidentally? Accidentally on purpose? Who knows. It happened, and we just - went from there." He sipped his drink. "I agree the celibate life would be a waste of perfectly good virility. Can't see how it would interfere with a life goal, though, unless you've a burning desire to found your very own nation-state?"

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

"No, just a burning desire to find The One, whoever that is. But it's not like I haven't spend four hundred years on that little hobby." He made a face. "I suppose ten more wouldn't kill me."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

Reilly looked off into middle distance. "I'm not quite sure I believe in the concept of the One. It's a lovely idea, but it seems rather a bit too good to be true." He tilted his glass toward Amsterdam. "And it certainly stacks the odds against us mere mortals if it is, now doesn't it?"

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

He tapped the edge of the hookah against the table. "Honestly? The Good Enough would have been just fine for me."

John took a swig of his water. "So now it's your turn. Story time."