ten minutes
by Helen

They'd met at a party. sort of. JC had been escaping from it, a little dizzy from the amount he'd had to drink, making his excuses to one debutante or another, slipping up the stairs and along a dark hallway, finally finding a study that seemed to be empty. He stepped inside and when he flipped on the lights, saw a broken window, and the man rifling though the desk snapped his head up, looking at him sharply, and said

"Fuck—" and the next thing he knew JC was pinned back against the wall, knife at his throat. "Who the fuck are you?" he snarled, yanking JC's hair back, knicking him slightly with the knife.

"Nobody—I'm not—."

The man spoke into his headset. "Joe, we gotta problem, here." He turned back to JC. "Anyone meeting you here?"

"No."

"If I let you sit down, are you gonna make any noise?"

"No."

"'cause if you make noise, I'm gonna kill you, okay?"

"Okay," he whispered.

"You know I'll do it, right?"

Later, he would remember being terrified, remember how hard his heart was beating, but at the time, he could only feel the man's hand clutching his arm, could only nod in agreement.

"yeah."

The man sighed. "Siddown," he said, gesturing to a chair. "What's your name?"

"Josh Chasez."

"Josh Chasez," the man repeated into his headset. "What are you doing here?"

"There's a party—I was just. trying to get away."

The man listened intently to his headset for a minute before saying: "You're Colonel Chasez' kid?"

"yeah."

"Fuck," the man said again. "You in the army?"

"No. I'm. I'm at the university. I study, um. I'm in electrical engineering."

"mm," the man said. "okay."

"What are you—"

"Here's what's gonna happen," the man said, dark eyes fixed on his. "I'm gonna leave through that window. and you're gonna sit here for ten, fifteen minutes, and then you're going to go back to the party, and then you're going to go back to your books and forget you ever saw me. how's that?"

"I. okay."

"You're gonna get blood on your shirt," the man said, fishing a handkerchief out of his pocket and pressing it against JC's neck.

"thanks," he mumbled.

"Not much of a party is it, then," the man said, idly. He was listening to his headset, waiting for something.

"Not much," JC said.

"mm. No pretty girls?"

"I—" JC said, but the man was moving, rising quickly to his feet and sticking his knife in a holster on his belt, muttering something quickly into his headset. He turned quickly back to JC, and was still for a moment before leaning down, hands on the armrests on either side of JC. He smiled, fleetingly, and it was a kind smile.

"Like that, is it?" he said, and then his lips were on JC's, quick and soft, tongue licking the corner of JC's mouth. "Ten minutes," he whispered, and was across the room and out the window before JC could open his mouth to say anything.

He sat there for twenty minutes. He spent the next three days in the archive at the university, hunched in front of a microfiche machine, the glare making his head ache. On the afternoon of the fourth day, he found it: a bad picture, smudged and dark, but still unmistakeably the man he'd seen. A revolutionary, a criminal, an enemy of the state, a known killer. JC read the articles numbly, and asked for a photocopy of the picture. A paper, he said. He was doing a paper for his political science class.

In a month, he'd stolen his father's security access codes. In two months he probably knew more about The Project than anyone in the country. In three months, he was sitting on a desk in another study, waiting. In his backpack were six pairs of underwear, a sweater, a pair of pants, two shirts, a toothbrush, a bar of chocolate, and seven high density disks, all of them full.