First Daughter By Fish Stark © 2010 Fish Stark. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced by any means without express permission from author. For two of my most influential middle school teachers—Mrs. Moochler, my English teacher, who provided the guidance that a writer needs, and Mrs. Flynn, my math teacher, who provided the insanity that a writer needs. © 2010 Fish Stark. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced by any means without express permission from author. 1 The Albanian Capitol was a large, white marble building dotted with Albanian flags and bird poop. Lawmakers and their interns scurried around like ants in a maze, trying to look busy when in fact they weren‘t. All the lawmakers did was hustle bribes from cigar-chomping corporate lobbyists who were bulging out of their three-piece suits while their interns played online games and brewed the occasional coffee. This was not where the real work of the Albanian government was done—this was a joke. The real work was done in a sleek black building seven miles away. Gleaming like a polished ruby, it was what the Albanians had purchased with the hard-earned tax dollars the citizens had gotten from selling leftover war weapons to Iran, Jordan, and a scientology cult. Over a thousand people were employed in this complex. Here no bribes were hustled, and no online games were played unless you wanted to be jobless for the rest of your life. Here the guards marched vigilantly, proudly showcasing their gleaming machine guns to any civilians who happened by, causing the civilians to think: Something important is going on in there, but I have no freaking idea what. That was what set Albania apart from the rest of the world—the public was always assured that there was something going on. In fact, there was. The Albanian Military and Intelligence center was where the soldiers were trained, the spies were trained, the orders for tanks and guns were filled out, and where the self-appointed defense minister worked on his plan. No one knew the defense minister‘s name, not even the defense minister himself. He had been brainwashed years ago after a mission went awry, and was too busy laboring over elaborate blueprints like a millionaire‘s trophy wife labors over her Chihuahua to create a new name for himself. He was simply called ‗sir‘ to his face, but even he knew that behind his back everybody called him Marrosur Kopil. Crazy Bastard. And that he was. He wouldn‘t had minded had anyone on his staff chosen to call him ‗Marrosur Kopil‘; however, he did once drown an American in a tank of acid because he had called him ‗pal‘. None of Albania‘s prime ministers had been able to look him in the eye and tell him to step down, not even the one who very memorably told Kim Jon Il to ―Get a haircut, for Christ‘s sake.‖ © 2010 Fish Stark. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced by any means without express permission from author. Marrosur Kopil dreamed of having a nuclear arsenal that would make America‘s enormous collection of bombs look like measly firecrackers, and he had a master plan to achieve such nuclear dominance. But first, he needed a source of money, and while people were giving away American dollars like those ugly sweaters your aunt sends you for Christmas, he did not trust American dollars any more than he trusted his wives, which might have explained why he was on his seventeenth, and none of the previous 16 had ever been found. Marrosur Kopil had a master plan for getting the money as well. Once, he had tried and failed, after which he blamed everyone but himself and ordered the army to invade Macedonia, but calmed down by the time the prime minister‘s secretary‘s secretary came with an armed escort and told him, quaking with fear, that the prime minister refused to go through with the invasion. Kopil had noticed with pleasure that the man had wet his pants during the discussion. It was time to try again. If there was one thing Kopil would not do, it was fail. He once used a blowtorch to break into an uncooperative vending machine to get his rightful pack of Skittles, the only American thing he had ever trusted or would ever trust. He pushed a button on his intercom. ―Send for Griffin Peshk,‖ he rasped, then yanked the cord out of the wall before his secretary could bombard him with follow-up questions. The secretary had only been there two weeks—the job paid well, but no one lasted long—but she knew enough to know that when Kopil‘s demands weren‘t met, he got angry. As in I-Will-Kill-Your-Kids angry. She had three kids, all of whom she loved dearly, so she turned to the two guards on either side of her and said, ―Kopil wants Griffin Peshk.‖ Collectively, the two guards had five kids and did not want to see any of them hurt, so they set off at a jog, even though neither of them knew who the hell Griffin Peshk was. In fact, only fifteen people knew who Griffin Peshk was. Ten were dead. There was a reason for all this secrecy--Griffin Peshk was Marrosur Kopil‘s secret weapon. © 2010 Fish Stark. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced by any means without express permission from author. 2 A pair of fists swung around like loose cannonballs, slamming loudly into the punching bags. The bags deflated for a second, leaving a fist-shaped hole where they had been punched, then returned to normal form, the poster children of resilience. After one lethal roundhouse kick too many, one of the bags popped open, spilling stuffing all over the floor of the barren and dimly lit room. The Albanian government spent almost as much on these bags as they did for educating the nation‘s children, who were still learning to read out of readers from the World War I era. Griffin Peshk shrugged and went to work on the other bags. What he had broken was just a bag. It would be replaced. ―Never attach yourself to anything,‖ roared Sir, the hatchet-faced instructor who visited Griffin every day. Sir taught at the normal spy school, showing the 300 children who had been taken from their parents for training when times were so bad that you could get ten kids for a loaf of bread, but Griffin was not allowed to go to that school. Sir had determined, ten years ago, that Griffin was special, and that he must be kept alone so that he would not be distracted. He had never watched TV, been outside of the Albanian intelligence center, and he had never heard music in his life. Sir‘s philosophy was that the perfect spy had to be detached from everything. From what Griffin knew about religion, espionage was like Buddhism, but with more guns. If Griffin went to a normal school, his lack of social skills and pop culture knowledge would cause him to be ridiculed. Spy instinct would have inspired him to break the heckler‘s neck using only three fingers, and of course that would get him expelled. Besides, Griffin had no need to go to a normal school. He had become accustomed to the rigorous training regimens put in place by Sir, like a person moving from New York to Texas gets accustomed to the fact that all of their TV shows now come on at different times. Griffin was thirteen, but looked older. Not because of his size—he was only five feet, seven inches tall and quite slim—but because he had a weathered look to him. There was a hardness in his face and eyes usually reserved for a retiree who sits on the front porch with a shotgun and yells at everyone who passes by. Griffin had been punching and kicking and spinning for an hour and a half straight, so he stopped, stretched, and slurped a little bit of water from a thermos. Sir © 2010 Fish Stark. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced by any means without express permission from author. had told him that it was supposed to last the whole day. ―Some missions, there won‘t be any food or water, and you‘re going to have to learn to adjust.‖ Griffin was allowed to eat normally that day, but God knows what he‘d get tomorrow. Sir was about as consistent as John Kerry and as predictable as a pop quiz. Griffin treated himself to another sip of water, then put the cap on the thermos and swished it around. It was about a quarter of the way full. He checked his watch. Dinner would be in an hour or so; he saved the rest for then. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and went back to the punching bags, hitting them with an intensity only exceeded by that of the hosts of The View. He had been whaling at the bags for an hour when Sir walked in. The two guards the receptionist had sent to find Griffin Peshk had spent an hour asking everyone they saw ―Who‘s Griffin Peshk and where can we find him?‖ They got mostly blank stares and a few requests to show their ID cards. After an hour, they realized that they were possibly in very great danger of Kopil‘s wrath, so they called the secretary and told her that not only had they not been able to find Griffin Peshk, but they were also taking their families and leaving their country.