Dunslough Cartographic Society/Clip

Real name: Curnos Slane Playbook: Spider

Flashback: Objectivity

Curnos Slane sighed as he closed the door behind the asset. The discipline, he mused to himself for at least the hundredth time, was the hardest part of his job. Hiding his less regular activites from the Imperium had become a matter of habit. Avoiding intimate relationships was a shame but the necessity had become obvious during his first month in Duskvol. He could never have mantained the lies required to make a relationship work. Only the discipline of mental counterintelligence still imposed its ugliness on his conscious mind.

Handling a source or field operative required a level of perceived intimacy. Those people needed to feel like their handler knew them, understood them, cared for them, protected them. A successful handler knew that any one of them could lie, could be turned, could have second thoughts, and that the change from friend to enemy or to complete stranger might be needed at any time. His teachers back in Skovlan taught a simple rule: when face to face, be aware of the person, in all their moods, their needs, their subtle signs of sincerity or lack thereof. The moment the asset leaves, forget their name, forget their story, let them become an object. An asset. Handling an asset requires faking emotion but leaves no room for having it. You see them off, and you clip their identities write out of your memory.

Ironically, it was Jeren, and Riven, and Marwos he'd come to rely on. His closest friends in the world were an archivist who'd taken so much Skovlan money that he'd become less a traitor to the Imperium than a man who occasionally wrote down the truth to see what would happen, a chemist whose little performance enhancers had become almost necessary for a couple of his more aggressive assets to perform at the necesary level, and a forger who, if the quality of the work mattered most, would be the one who designed the Imperium's official documents.

He looked down at his records and saw again that there he'd run out of options. Skovlan hadn't sent money in two months. Nobody was going to take the throne with Alayne dead. Nobody would even take the time to tell him he was on his own. Self-protection had its own harsh logic. That pile held assets who could be dropped cold and couldn't come back on him. The next pile showed those who could be managed. The third would need to be cleaned up more actively. Those piles, properly managed, would clip the cord on the work he'd done for seven years, without any tracks. Getting sentimental about it would change nothing. Jeren could be salvaged - the work had been done on a cash basis, and he'd need an archivist in the future. Riven would be a problem but he would find a way to salvage the relationship. The arrogant bastard had advanced him credit, and drugs bought on credit had helped resolve two crises as the war got worse. He simply would not repay that courtesy with another name on pile three. But Marwos... Marwos had written the Curnos Slane papers. He could not tolerate having a man out there who could so casually undo all his attempts to build a new life for himself. The forger's name went to the top of pile 3. It was possible his resources would run dry before he ever reached the bottom of that pile, but Reticent Kel's knife would ensure that the man at the top of the list died with his secrets. To start any new life, you had to clip the cord.