The Agency of Redbirds
Mariel opened her little sketchbook and pulled her knees up to prop it up as she leaned against the back of her seat on the subway. The person in front of her- a woman about her age- had earbuds in and seemed deeply invested in something on her phone. Mariel had taken a short break from sketching people on the subway since she had gotten caught and offended someone by drawing them, but it seemed safe to draw the woman. She seemed oblivious of the outside world, chewing on her bottom lip in what seemed like concentration.
Mariel popped the cap off her pen and started drawing. She liked faces. She had always liked faces, and found them fascinating, and she liked drawing faces of people who she saw on the subway, because of the range- scraggly old men, clean-cut young business people, excited kids, bewildered tourists, college-aged students. She had nearly filled this sketchbook with quick pen sketches of people. Some of them were unfinished because sometimes people got off before Mariel was done, but this woman didn’t look like she was going anywhere anytime soon.
The woman had short hair, falling sharply at her jawline, and bangs that were a little messed up as if she had pushed them back at some point. She looked like she had mostly Latin heritage, but Mariel was really bad at telling where people were from, so there was a more than possible chance she didn’t. Mariel shaded in her hair, and was adding definition to the lips when the woman looked up, a rather annoyed look on her face.
“Can I help you?” she asked rudely. Mariel shook her head, unembarrassed. She had been caught by strangers she was drawing one too many times to be concerned.
“Nope, sorry.”
“Yeah, okay. Don’t stare at people on the train,” the woman snapped, and turned back to her book. Mariel sighed, and flipped the page, finding another, more unaware person a few seats down to draw. It was just another face added to her unfinished collection- it was no big deal.
As the disembodied voice announced Mariel’s upcoming stop, the woman put her book in her bag, ran her fingers through her bangs until they laid flat, and pulled on a red suit jacket that matched her nicely tailored pants. Mariel did little to prepare for her stop other than shoving her sketchbook in her purse. Trying to smooth her hair would be fruitless, and the slacks she had on - which she had borrowed from her sister- were considerably less sharp than what the other woman was wearing.
The train slowed to a stop, and Mariel grabbed her bag, making a beeline for the door. She spent a considerable amount of time on the subway, but had never quite grown as fond of it as most commuters did.
“Watch where you’re going,” the red-suited woman snapped as they bumped into each other.
“Sorry,” Mariel shrugged, rolling her eyes as the woman ignored her and stalked out, a few feet ahead of her. Personal space wasn’t really a thing when you were riding on a crowded subway at six in the morning.
She glanced at her phone for the address again- the street was 27th street, building was 4021, the floor was 7, and the room was 136. 27, 4021, 7, 136. Mariel had been repeating them over and over again in hopes that she wouldn’t get lost. She couldn’t afford to be late to this job interview- it was the tenth one she’d gone on in the past two weeks, and none of the others had went well.
She had been living with her sister Aerin for the past six months, since she graduated college, and while she and her sister were on very good terms, it was becoming clear she was overstaying her welcome. Aerin wanted her boyfriend to move in, but three grown adults in the apartment would be a little much, especially with Mariel as the third wheel. But to move out she needed to get a real job that paid more than minimum wage- she had been working at the cafe down the street (apparently the best job she could land with her college degree) until it closed and managed to save enough money to pay for maybe two months in her own apartment, if she didn’t want to eat. It was a reality she had been actively avoiding since she graduated, but Aerin’s growing annoyance of her little sister living in her home was becoming more and more apparent.
“Are you following me?”
The red-suited woman was still in front of her, but had now turned around to face her, looking rather menacing. Mariel shook her head.
“No- I’m just trying to find 4021 on 27th street. Do you know where that is?”
The woman narrowed her eyes.
“Why?”
“I- I have a job interview? It’s really none of your business.” The woman’s paranoia was starting to get on her nerves.
“Name?”
"This isn’t the interview.”
“I’ll show you where it is, just give me your name.”
“I can find it by myself, thanks,” Mariel rolled her eyes. The woman shot her an unreadable look and walked off, leaving Mariel thoroughly bewildered. She waited until the red suited woman was out of sight, then turned down a few more streets until she found 4021. It was a large, imposing looking building, perhaps from the turn of the nineteenth century, and, after taking a deep breath and retucking her blouse, Mariel let herself in.
The first floor seemed to be made up of wide, dimly lit rooms with couches and coffee tables and chandeliers that looked like the same vintage as the building. It looked like the lobby of a hotel, and, judging by the sleepy woman at the front desk, it probably was. Mariel double checked that she had come to the right place before she started climbing the stairs (she had asked the woman behind the front desk and she had said there was no elevator). The second through sixth floors looked like how she would expect a classy-looking hotel to look, but once she got to the seventh floor (considerably out of breath) she was confronted with a pair of heavy looking metal doors.
Pushing on them slightly, she discovered they were locked, but before she could fully register the strangeness of that fact, a blaring alarm shot through the staircase. Mariel yelped, and began retreating down the staircase. She had gotten ten stairs down before the alarm stopped, and the metal doors at the top opened, displaying the second red-suited woman Mariel had met that morning.
“Are you Mariel DeVaughn?” she asked, and Mariel struggled to find her voice.
“Y-yes?”
“Very well- come with me. Sorry about the alarm. Nobody uses this door.” The woman’s voice was as sharp as her appearance. She had high cheekbones, a rather beaklike nose, and her hair - which was a greying even though the woman didn’t look much older than thirty - was scraped back into a severe bun at the nape of her neck.
Mariel was pretty sure she was supposed to say something to sound polite, but she couldn’t really think of anything at the moment, and the woman was leading her down a pristine, brightly-lit hallway that looked nothing like the rest of the building. She lead Mariel into a room with a small, red, 136 printed on the door. It was a much larger room than Mariel was expecting, with a long table in the middle, and not much else. The woman sat down, and motioned for Mariel to sit in front of her.
“Let’s get started.”
“With the interview?” Mariel asked stupidly. She was incredibly thrown by the place.
"Yes. Would you like to begin?”
“What? Oh, yes. Right. My name is Mariel DeVaughn, and as I’m sure you’ve seen on my resume, I recently graduated college with a degree in psychology, and I have extensive experience working in customer service, which will be very beneficial to being a secretary. I am diligent and a hard worker, and I will never slack on my work.” Mariel had been through this so many times in the last two weeks she was hardly putting any effort into it, but the woman didn’t seem too interested anyway.
“Yes, yes, I saw all of that on your application. Now that we’ve gotten that over with, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Of course.”
“What’s your family like?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your relationship with your family.”
“Um- I have an older sister, Aerin, who I’m really close with. I’m living with her right now while I get my feet on the ground. My parents are both dead for over ten years at this point, and my grandfather who raised my sister and me is in a nursing home now.”
“Are you engaged or married?”
“No...” Mariel said, not really knowing why the questions were necessary. “I’m not in a relationship at all.”
“Very good. And how would your sister describe you?”
“Um... hardworking, passionate, gets along well with people-”
“You misunderstand me- I’m talking in terms of personality, not in terms of work. Would she describe you as a trustworthy person? Did you lie a lot as a teenager? Take her stuff? Do you still take her stuff?”
“I don’t really know what these questions have to do with me getting this job-”
“Just answer them, Ms DeVaughn.”
“Okay, well, I think she’d describe me as trustworthy. I mean, I did take her stuff when we were little, but every little sister does that to their big sister, but I don’t do it anymore.” Mariel paused, and remembered she was wearing Aerin’s slacks. “I mean, unless she gives me permission to.”
“Do you have a criminal record?”
“No. The worst I’ve done is gotten a lot of parking tickets,” Mariel shrugged. Most of them she hadn’t paid off either, but that wasn’t important at the moment.
There was a sharp knock on the door, and before either Mariel or the woman could make a move it flew open, and the rude woman from the train stormed in, her bangs messed up again, holding a phone.
“Amy, I’m going to strangle this man, you have no idea. We’re the fastest branch, and yet, he’s threatening to dissolve us again if we don’t have the Mirren case resolved by Thursday. Which I don’t even know where to sta-” the woman stopped, her eyes finally landing on Mariel, and her countenance sinking into an even deeper scowl.
“You,” she said, sounding exasperated. “Is this what we do now, Amy? Hire random civilians off the street?”
“Ms DeVaughn has been thoroughly vetted, and is a trustworthy candidate. I’m sure you don’t want to keep doing the work of a secretary, Maria?”
“If you don’t stop calling me Maria, I’m going to quit,” Maria said, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. “And I’m sure we can find someone better than her. I’m assuming she was the one who set off the alarm earlier?”
“Ms DeVaughn just used the old entrance- she didn’t know about the elevator, but I had hoped that somebody would have informed her where it was,” Amy said cooly. Maria colored.
“She wouldn’t give her name - and I couldn’t believe that you would be hiring such an average person.”
“Excuse me?” Mariel asked, getting rather tired of being talked about as though she wasn’t there.
“No offense to you, I’m sure you’re a perfectly pleasant person when you’re with equals,” Maria said, a derisive tone in her voice.
“Hey, there’s no need to be a jerk,” Mariel told her, but the other woman ignored her.
“Amy, might I remind you what happened the last time we hired a civilian?”
“Maria, might I remind you what you were before you joined us? Ms DeVaughn is to be a secretary and nothing else. She will be given no unnecessary information, nothing to put her in harm’s way. It’s of no concern to you.”
“Amy-”
“Maria- don’t forget whose idea it was to promote Karine from secretary to redbird,” Amy said, a tone of finality in her voice. Something more than fury flashed in Maria’s eyes, and she turned on her heel and stalked out the door, not stopping when Amy shouted “And don’t worry about Briggs, you know he’s been threatening to dissolve us once a week for the past decade!”
“Sorry about that.” Amy turned back to Mariel. “That was just Mack. She’s a good agent, probably our best, but she’s been through enough to not make her trust anyone.”
“Mack? Why were you calling her Maria?”
“Maria is her real name- she hates it.” Amy offered no further explanation.
“And- what is this place?” Mariel was feeling a bit braver now that her interrogator had a name, but just as the place had started to feel less foreboding, Amy and Mack had started throwing around terms like “agent”, “civilian”, and “harm’s way”.
“The Agency of Redbirds- I’ll admit the name sounds a little cheesy when paired with the suits, but the name came first.”
“And what... what do you do?”
“A little bit of everything, but we’re mostly the best tracking agency in the universe. We’ll find anyone.”
“Why- why have I never heard of you?”
“The people we find are very... specific.”
“Specific?”
“Specific.” Amy’s voice told Mariel she wasn’t going to give any better answer, and Mariel gave up.
“So, if I were to get the job, what would my responsibilities consist of?”
“I’m afraid you would be our runner. Transporting information, transferring calls, fetching coffee. It may be a little boring, but absolutely nothing dangerous.”
“Right.” Mariel hadn’t expected anything dangerous to come with her job as a secretary.
“Let’s continue with the interview, shall we?”
“O-okay.”
Amy asked several more strange questions, then stood up and motioned for Mariel to follow. They walked down the long hallway, filled entirely with shut doors, passing a few other women in sharply tailored red suits, until they reached a wooden door at the end, that looked strangely out of place with the sterile, modern, environment.
“This is the entrance and exit we use- we found the stairs were inconvenient and unsafe. It will take you down to the basement, you’ll find stairs that lead you up and you’ll emerge from a little garage in an alleyway. Turning left will take you to the main street.”
“Okay. Basement, stairs, shed, turn left.”
“Right.”
“And when will I hear about the job?”
“Hear about the job?” Amy’s face looked blank.
“If I got it.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t have been let in if you didn’t have the job. We’ve been doing background checks on you for weeks, Ms DeVaughn. This was just for formalities.”
Amy said this like it was obvious, and Mariel couldn’t formulate one specific question to ask, and instead, stammered out a thank-you and opened the door to the elevator.
“I expect you to be here at nine o’clock on Monday.”
“We didn’t discuss hours.”
“They’re just regular nine-to-five for you. Don’t worry.”
“Right,” Mariel said, feeling stupid. “And is there... a dress code or something?”
“Only for the official Redbirds. You can dress however you like.”
“Alright. See you Monday morning, then.”
“Yes,” Amy nodded, and Mariel stepped into the elevator, using the ride down to the basement and the walk out to the main street to reflect on the weirdness she had just experienced. She had no idea what the Agency of Redbirds was, and when she tried to google it on her phone, nothing came up but a design agency that she was pretty sure was not what she was looking for. But were they really the best tracking agency in the ‘universe’? Why were the people they found a specific type of person? What was with the secrecy and the hints of something dangerous? Mariel was pretty sure the job wouldn’t be a good fit for her, and was pretty sure if she had any other options she wouldn’t take it, but she was desperate, and it paid shockingly well for a secretarial position. Mariel wondered if they were buying her silence.
“How’d it go?” Aerin asked, as Mariel flung open the door to Aerin’s apartment. Mariel shrugged.
“Pretty good. I got the job.”
“You got the job!? Congratulations!”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“This was the one with the really good salary, right?”
“Yes - I’ll be out of your hair in no time.”
“Why don’t you seem excited? What’s the catch?”
“It was a weird place.”
“Weird? In what way?”
“I- don’t know. They’re real secretive, and won’t tell me everything.”
“Do you think it’s like, organized crime or something?”
“I think it’s more than that. I don’t know. They don’t seem like criminals - I just feel like I’m in a movie. They’re all sleek and professional and wearing red suits. It’s weird.”
Mariel wasn’t sure how much she was supposed to tell, but she was pretty sure she had already said too much. She got the feeling this wasn’t the kind of job she should be talking about with her friends and family, not by the kind of questions Amy asked her. Not from the fact that they’d been doing background checks on her for weeks. There was something about that that Mariel didn’t like.
“Well, I’m sure it will grow on you.”
“Of course. Beggars can’t be choosers. And I’ll be moved out as soon as possible.”
“Don’t rush it,” Aerin said, halfheartedly. Mariel shrugged, and flopped down on the couch she had been sleeping on. She couldn’t wait to move out either, to have her own room. She hadn’t had her own room since senior year of high school, and it sounded like heaven.
