The Bad Beat

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When you’re a spy, repetition becomes second nature. Spend ten days in a cave in Afghanistan staring at the same tent waiting for something, anything, to happen and you either learn how to avoid the perils of boredom or you risk blowing your mission or, worse, getting yourself killed. So you learn how to play games with your mind. You catalog. You assess. You occasionally see if you can remember every song you learned at Silver Spur camp that one summer you and your brother were sent there for “accidentally” blowing up your neighbor’s Fiat. And then, when your shot comes, you take it, get out and move on to the next repetitive exercise in some other foreign land. Because when you’re a spy, you live for the five seconds of adrenaline that result from weeks of paper preparation and solitary scouting.

Which is why, against my better judgment, I agreed to go with my friend Sam Axe on an errand. It was the kind of errand that required me to bring a MAC-10 with me, which was fine. It’s always better to be overprepared than underprepared in these situations.

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