Dear Visual Listeners,

The life of a top secret government agent isn’t all bow ties and card games. Sometimes you find yourself in the trenches. Sometimes you gotta get dirty. Sometimes you have to do what’s necessary for the greater good.

One of those times occurred a few weeks back. I had a pretty long day at the office. The director had been riding my ass about all kinds of shit. When I finally got to my car, I had to take a long draw from the menthol light I kept in my shirt pocket, in case of emergencies, to calm my nerves. My clearance level isn’t even that high, but I still find myself getting called in to do stuff that the special agents should’ve been taking care of.

I had to get a drink. I met another good agent friend of mine at a local bar. We had a few drinks, threw some darts, and chatted about the life. At around 11pm, I called it. The other agent picked up the tab and we went our separate ways. I wasn’t in the house for five minutes before I got the call. Three of our fellow agents had been investigated for espionage and sabotage and it was my job to do the final questioning…and the execution. It was a hard thing to consider, but it had to be done.

I met filthy Agent Alexandria behind the compound. I was admittedly shaken when the exchange started. My nerves were bad. I knew what I was going to have to do. I was going to have to take her out. I told her that she had been found out. I attempted to explain to her that the secrets she sold put a target on her back and that she should’ve run. She laughed and attempted to say she had no idea what I was talking about. Her lies made pulling the trigger even easier. I screwed the silencer onto the gun behind my back. I waited for her to turn around. An open casket for her family, that was the goal. She knew what was happening though. She kept eye contact with me the whole time, never blinking. Why couldn’t she just have stayed loyal. Why couldn’t she have realized that the agency cared so much about her. Why? After brief hesitation, I raised the Beretta and put two in the center of her chest. She fell silently on the pavement. Her blood pooled around her ashy ass hands and ankles. I wiped off the pistol and placed it on her chest. For good measure, I sprinkled a bit of crack on her.

I found the next agent at her home. Dorothy Jaqueline Daniels had already crawled half way into a bottle of brown liquor. It was the cheap stuff too. She smelled like the area beneath the toilet at an El Cheapo Gas Station. She looked like a burrito. I don’t really know what the hell that even means, but the description fits, so just go with it. She was wasted and talking way too much shit. I asked her why she chose to betray the agency. She denied it. Typical, Dorothy. She never realized that all her conversations were monitored for the last 3 months. When I gave her that little detail, she began to sing. She admitted to sharing personnel information to a hostile agency. She didn’t know that agency had her on record giving out way more than the tidbits she confessed to. I poured her another glass of the brown piss she was drinking, no ice. As she lifted the glass to her head, the whole thing disappeared under a hefty black trash bag. I could hear her filthy throat gurgling on the liquor as she suffocated within the black plastic. When the whole thing was over I set the scene. I tilted a photo on her wall and turned the area rug on her floor upside down. That’s all the signs of s typical neighborhood break in. For good measure I used her cheap ass lipstick to write on her wall, “I was always a terrible agent so I’m bout to suffocate myself in this trash bag.” That was guaranteed to be an open and shut case. I left, leaving the air conditioning on and the door wide open. The agency wanted her light bill as high as it could be.

The third agent was hard to find, so I had to track her by her cellphone. Taija Cramento was accused of sabotage. She purposely led people to believe that her clearance gave her access to certain things within the agency that she knew she didn’t have access to. Her actions led to a good agent being accused of abandonment and espionage. She scoffed at the idea that she had anything to do with it, but I had a job to complete, with or without her confession. I called in the air strike and had the building she was hiding in destroyed. I watched the wreckage on the news the next day. I made sure I deleted her contact information from the agency database so the air strike couldn’t be traced back to the department. I also spit on my television, because I wasn’t close enough to spit on the debris itself.

This job has a lot of great perks. But sometimes you gotta get dirty and clean the house. And when it comes to cleaning the house, I’m a goddamn Roomba, forever roaming…looking for the filthy dust bunnies.

“Echigoya, where have you hidden?” — Rikimaru (Tenchu)