Jay Choi: Spy Boy

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for this great honor, my ninth consecutive secret agent of the year award. During this now annual celebration of me, my fans often ask me, given the dangers of my profession, how I have become so impervious to death. It isn’t genetic endowment or talent that makes me hard to kill. I don’t have adamantium bones or skin scaled with bulletproof ceramic tiles. Survivorship is all about practice. It’s about the thousands of man-hours I put in each day to maintain a level of human fitness that makes me well nigh undeathable. That’s why I like to travel. It’s not just for vacation. It’s to stay up to date on the latest trends in unkillability. Every time I visit a new country, I hire a dozen local assassins to try and kill me. I’ve faced them all. Ninjas. Sicarios. Kali-worshipping thuggees. And I’m still here. But I was hardly some agent wunderkind. In fact, I was never supposed to be a spy at all.

It all began some time ago…

———————

I was nine and attending grade school. My parents, master spies themselves, were in deep cover as sleeper agents in the suburbs of that womb of heroes called Kansas, the gateway to Oz and home of Superman. It was just before winter break at Brookwood Elementary (go Beavers!), and my fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Towle was going over a geometry problem when there was a knock at the door. Entering the classroom was the principal’s secretary, a mousy young woman in glasses, sweater, and corduroy. She minced in and whispered to my teacher.

“Choi. Jay Choi,” said Mrs. Towle. “Please go with Miss Pfeiffer. There’s been a family emergency.”

Right away I knew something was fishy, because emergencies didn’t happen to my family: my family happened to emergencies.

In the hall, the secretary shifted gears from dainty steps to a brisk pace.

“What’s going on, Miss Pfeiffer?” I asked.

“You’re no child prodigy of espionage. You’re too easily led away,” she said. “I expected more from the agents Choi.”

“My parents don’t want me in the service. Who are you?” My cover was blown. I froze, readying the retractable blades in my sneakers.

Miss Pfeiffer spun on her heels, whipping off her sweater and cords. Gone was the dowdy secretarial cover: before me stood a lithe minx in a skintight white leather catsuit.

“My name,” she said with a Bavarian accent, “is Fulvia von Hedonax.” She tossed aside her glasses and unfurled a mane of tawny locks. Her ugly-duckling makeover was complete.

“Cinderella has nothing on you, fraulein. What’s going on?”

“The Agency requires a kid field agent. Quickly, a company jet is waiting at the playground.”

Aboard a supersonic airliner over the Atlantic Ocean, von Hedonax handed me two strapped bundles of $10,000.

“That’s twenty-thousand dollars for the job,” she said. “You’ll be back by the school bell tomorrow.”

I riffled the bills: oh, the days of hard cold cash. Nowadays twenty grand might not cover a supervillain’s daily caviar bill, but back then, to a nine-year-old boy, that kind of do-re-mi could buy a lot of comic books. But it wasn’t in my numbered Swiss bank account yet.

“What’s the mission?”

“Yesterday, an enemy agent stole a little black book transcribed with top-secret information.”

“Who’s the perp?”

“An unidentified operative who goes by the alias of Captain Corrupto.”

“Captain Corrupto? She did the Karachi job.”

“Just so. We believe she’s in the employ of the Evil Company.”

“ECom!” I punched a fist into my palm.

“We’ve tracked Corrupto’s whereabouts to Munich, where we’re heading now. Your mission is to recover that stolen black book.”

I tucked the twenty thousand into my bespoke coat pocket and asked: “So what’s in the black book?”

She steeled herself and whispered: “It’s the NON list.”

“The NON list? You don’t mean—”

“The Naughty Or Nice list.”

I jolted up in my first-class seat and ogled open-mouthed.

Fulvia nodded: “That’s right. Santa Claus needs you!”

I was putting all the pieces together. The implications were clear. And the results? Devastating. I said: “If the wrong person gets their hands on Santa’s Naughty Or Nice list…”

“They could reward the bad people and punish the good.”

“And bad incentives will encourage good people to do bad things. The world’s moral economy will collapse. It’ll be chaos!”

“This isn’t just about saving the world,” said von Hedonax. “It’s about saving Christmas. And you’re the only one that can do it!”

I built my first spy camera when I was four. I begged my parents to be fitted with a poison tooth, as there’s no greater badge of honor in the spy game than a hollow molar filled with potassium cyanide. Still, this mission was just a bit too burly for my big boy britches.

“Surely there are other operatives,” I said. “What about my mom and dad?”

“That’s the problem. Your parents have been captured by the Evil Company!”

“No!”

Ladies and gentlemen, I was tasked with saving my mom, my dad, Christmas, and the world, all before I knew the birds and the bees.

“Gimme the mission dossier!” A thousand-page file thumped into my lap, nearly knocking the wind out of me. “I need a drink please.”

A stewardess approached: “Yes?”

I asked: “Can I have two ounces of seltzer, an ounce of simple syrup with ice, poured into a cocktail glass, and topped with an olive Jolly Rancher? Shaken not stirred.”

I was on my third drink, poring over the file, when my head began to spin. Across from me, von Hedonax had lulled into a dazed stupor. Limp in her hand was a half-drunk can of Fresca.

We’d been poisoned!

A contralto laugh came from the galley. It was the stewardess.

Darkness was swirling over me. Where had I seen her before? Of course. Tangier. The chicken kebab disco. She was disguised as a bowl of couscous.

The stewardess whipped off her uniform, revealing a skintight black leather cat suit. I threw the cocktail glass at her. She ducked and it shattered against the service trolley. Then I blacked out.

I awoke with my feet dangling in the air. I was tied back to back to Fulvia. We were hanging from a thick rope in a dimly lit arena. Below us was a closed trap door, where muffled growls and roars could be heard.

“Miss von Hedonax, are you okay?”

“Yes, just a little groggy,” she said. “They must have put a mickey in my diet soda. How are you feeling?”

“A little unlucky. I’ve developed immunities to the most popular tranquilizers, snake venom, and even iocaine powder. Looks like we got something off-brand.” I was just gaining my situational awareness and had to keep cool. Fortunately, the sang froid coursing through my veins is like liquid nitrogen. I often pinprick my fingertip to flash-freeze my leftover vegetables.

Then I heard: “Son!”

Also hanging in midair was a neighboring tied-up couple.

“Mom! Dad!”

Despite being kidnapped and bound, my parents were looking as dapper as ever in their designer black ninja garb. After introductions and obligatory small talk, we exchanged sitreps. We were trapped inside a supervillain’s lair, which of course was under a volcano on a deserted island. Instead of Christmas shopping that morning, my parents had been activated to infiltrate this mysterious base, when they were betrayed by an agency mole and then captured. As I was relating the encounter on my flight, we heard that low horrid cackle.

The former stewardess prowled onto a balcony at our eye level. She was now wearing a skintight red leather catsuit and was trailed by four mountainous minions.

“Welcome to your doom,” she purred. “I am Captain Corrupto!” She lit a cigarette, because back then smoking was still considered super-cool.

“Captain,” said Dad, “Let our son and Miss von Hedonax go. They’ve got nothing to do with this.”

“Your fight is with me and my husband, not them,” said Mom.

“Au contraire, Mister and Missus Choi. I’ve captured all the agents likely to prevent my hijacking of Christmas.” Corrupto held up the black notebook in her hand and said: “Once I deliver this Naughty Or Nice list to the Evil Company, Santa Claus will be ruined and Christmas will fall!” She dissolved into her own over-generous laugh track.

“The names on the list are encoded with a cypher,” said Fulvia.

“Indeed, but I’ve duplicated the list, and my Corrupto Computer is now cracking that silly code like a plumber’s butt!”

“Huh?” said everyone.

“Silence!” The Captain slammed the book onto a control panel. “And then I will become the Anti-Claus!” She bubbled over with more vile honks of mirth. I was beginning to see why she was called Captain Corrupto and not Captain Mildly Unpleasanto.

“What is this, amateur hour?” Dad asked. “This looks more like the work of a mere Sergeant or Lieutenant Corrupto.”

“How dare you!”

“I guess I had higher expectations for a commissioned officer of corruption.”

“I was the valedictorian of my corrupt class! (Go Pirates!) I had a perfect score in my corrupt aptitude test: that’s math, verbal, and racketeering! I graduated magna cum laude and paid my own way by waiting tables at a delightful corrupt gastropub! I started as an intern in the mailroom at the Evil Company and worked up the corrupt ladder and now look at me! I’ve been divorced twice, I take statins for high-blood pressure, I’m still paying off my student loans, and I use exclamation points in my thoughts!”

Then Captain Corrupto sobbed.

It was obvious that we were witnessing some kind of long-overdue supervillain breakdown. She was exhibiting all the classic signs: the compensatory bluster, the abject self-pity, the suspended hostages.

“Miss Corrupto,” said Mom, “speaking as a woman, mother, wife, and secret agent, I know it’s not easy to maintain the proper work-life balance. Wouldn’t you agree, Miss von Hedonax?”

“Absolutely,” said Fulvia. “I have to juggle a social life, domestic labor, a self-care regime, and clandestine ops.”

Corrupto cried: “My supervillain ex-husbands were always too busy at work oppressing humanity. They never did any of the chores.”

“How thoughtless. That’s why communication and a fair division of household work are so important,” said Mom.

“That’s right,” said Dad. “Whether it’s spycraft or caring for Spy Junior here, we always talk it out and share the work equitably.”

“And let me tell you,” said Mom, “this man makes one hell of a duck confit.”

Captain Corrupto loosed a keening wail. For some moments, this stirring aria prevailed before subsiding to a sniffle and then a hyperactive chin wobble.

From my vantage, I could see Dad trying to work the knots on his wrist facing away from the captain: Mom was buying him time.

Corrupto sulked: “Why can’t a beautiful immoral woman like me find someone to share my criminal success with? No one wants to hear me brag about all the evil things I do to make the world such a terrible place.”

“People can be so ungrateful,” said Mom. “But not us. We’re plenty grateful, aren’t we?” Dad, Fulvia, and I murmured our assent. Mom continued: “We’re all just hanging out here, and we’re here to listen. In fact, we could all sit down, and you and I could talk it out while we get girl drink drunk.”

“You all are about the loveliest group of victims that a psychopath could ever ask for,” Corrupto said. “But I don’t like to burden prisoners with my dirty laundry. Evil is supposed to be cool, but this is just embarrassing.”

“Well,” said Dad, “there doesn’t seem to be much point of holding people against their will unless you can share your hopes, dreams, and fears with them. Am I right?” Nods of approval.

“If this gets around, I’ll be the laughingstock of criminal masterminds.”

“Mum’s the word,” said Mom.

“That’s my problem. People are so mediocre that they don’t want to talk to a masterpiece of nature concocted by an alchemy of superior genes and environmental stressors.”

“Sure, whatever you say. Don’t you ever talk to your minions?”

“Are you kidding me? Have you ever tried talking to minions? They could care less! They’re just in it for the money!”

“You could pay us enough to care,” muttered a minion.

The captain whipped around and screeched: “WHO SAID THAT?” She stalked and glowered into the mug of each minion, but they maintained a cowed and unanimous silence.

“Miss Corrupto!” Mom tried to regain the thread. But it was too late.

“Are you all crazy?” screamed Corrupto. “Do you know what a minion costs these days? This is a criminal enterprise! I’m not running a charity!” Bosses. Good or bad, they’re all the same: a bunch of cheapskates.

Captain Corrupto twirled around, wagging a finger at us: “Oh, you’re good! Your Jedi mind tricks nearly foiled my plans to foil Christmas! But the only thing you fools will be foiling is yourselves!” She punched a button on the control panel. Below our feet, the trapdoor yawned open. The growls and roars grew to a fever pitch. Spotlights exposed a gaping pit. It wasn’t a pool full of man-eating piranha. It was much worse.

“Behold!” bellowed Corrupto. “My army of genetically modified murder bears!”

Just under us were four roiling monstrosities with claws and fangs the size of bananas. Flecks of foul slobber licked up at our shoes.

Then Corrupto pointed up: “And behold above!”

We looked up, our two lines of rope vanishing into nothingness on high.

“I don’t see anything,” said Dad.

“What you don’t see is your rope tied to a rafter. That rafter is teeming with voracious raccoons. Those raccoons are gnawing away at your rope which is interwoven with puppy chow. That puppy-chowderized rope will be cut in almost certainly less time than you’ll need to hatch an escape plan!”

On cue, there was the squeak from above. It was the familiar cry of a raccoon suddenly losing its footing and then falling. It shot past us and into the maw of a murder bear below, like a flying amuse-bouche.

“Say merry Christmas to that raccoon— IN HELL!” Captain Corrupto whirled and withdrew down a corridor along with her minions and her fruity ripples of mwa-ha-ha laughter.

“Darling,” said Dad to Mom, “your persuasion technique was masterful. Corrupto nearly invited you to happy-hour mojitos.”

“If only that minion hadn’t broken the spell,” said Mom. “Any luck with the ropes, dear?”

“Unfortunately no. These knots must’ve been tied by a super eagle scout.”

Our situation appeared hopeless. We were doomed. Christmas was done.

Or was it?

“Corrupto left the black book on the control panel,” said Fulvia.

“Yes, but she said it’s been copied,” said Mom. “The list is being decrypted.”

“She doesn’t have the right Naughty Or Nice list.”

“What do you mean?” asked Dad.

“In that book, the plainly visible encrypted names are just decoys. The real Naughty Or Nice list is printed on microdots disguised as punctuation marks.”

“Steganography!” said my parents. They traded lovey-dovey eyes over their shoulders.

“So if we could get that book—” said Mom.

“We could still save Christmas!” finished Dad.

I clapped the heels of my sneakers: a retractable blade snapped out of the right shoe’s toe box. I lifted up my foot up so they all could see it.

Dad grimaced: “So it was you who stole my shoe switchblade.”

“Even if that little knife could cut these ropes,” Fulvia said, “it won’t be a match against those murder bears.” A Greek chorus of murder howls from below concurred with enthusiasm.

“It’s not meant to kill anything,” I said.

“Good thinking, son!” said Dad. “Go on.”

“The blade delivers a contact neurotoxin that can put a man in a coma for days. If we can remove my sneaker, the poison can be milked by squeezing the syrette inside the sole. A few drops of nerve agent might put those murder bears to sleep!”

“Well done, Jay!” said Mom. “Also, you’re grounded for stealing your father’s sublethal weapon system.”

“Agreed. Now quickly,” said Dad, “this rope won’t last against those rafter raccoons.”

With some effort, I kicked up the shoe between my own and Fulvia’s hand bound to our sides. I removed the tubular syrette from the sole and then made it rain toxins. Below us, the murder bears leapt at the drops. But after some time, the bears weren’t calming down. Quite the contrary: they were whipping themselves up to a bacchanalian frenzy. They were frisking and hugging and gyrating. Then came the grunts and moans and yawps. It was like being under the swells of a furry brown sea.

“What’s wrong with those bears?” I asked. Unbeknownst to science, the neurotoxin turned out to be a potent murder bear aphrodisiac.

“Jay, don’t look down,” said Mom.

“There’s something we need to discuss, boy,” said Dad.

It’s not every nine-year-old who gets the talk of the birds and the bees while dangling over an orgy of murder bears.

In twenty minutes, the rope snapped, and we landed on a cushion of snoozing murder bears in post-coital bliss. We were slicing the remaining ropes with the sneaker blade when I reached a great milestone in my secret agent career.

“It just goes to show love does conquer all,” I said. Ba-dum-tss: it was my first cheesy one-liner. Fulvia couldn’t suppress a groan at my zinger. My parents however would offer almost too much approval.

“It certainly does,” Dad intoned huskily. On cue, my parents mashed into each other and smooched hard. Apparently human arousal is strongly correlated with near-death experiences and ursine fornicators. Soon it became clear that we were in the midst of a new and mortifying threat, that my parents’ strenuous bout of canoodling might escalate to a second gruntapalooza.

“Ahem!” I coughed. My parents snapped apart.

“Right!” said Dad. “We need to scale the pit walls and reach that balcony. Honey, if you please, step onto my shoulders. Now, Miss von Hedonax, if you could help hoist my boy up to the missus and then follow him up? Just climb us like a ladder. No, no, I’ve got it. I never skip leg day.”

I scampered up the makeshift parent beanstalk, pulled myself onto the balcony, and then helped Fulvia up. The black book was lying on the control panel. It was ours!

“All right,” said Mom, “we’re going to throw you a rope. Secure it and we’ll climb out.” But before anyone moved an inch, we heard:

“My sugar bears!”

In the pit, my parents swung around to a portcullis. There behind the bars stood an old minion with parallel scars raking across his face and one opaque eye. It was the murder bear keeper.

“Alarm! Guards!” he croaked. A klaxon sounded, followed by a scamper of boots.

Dad roared up to the balcony: “Get the black book and meet us at the hangar!”

“But Dad—!”

“Do as your father says, Jay! Go now!” shouted Mom.

“Don’t shoot the prisoners!” bawled the bear keeper to other minions, “you’ll hit my chocolate babies!”

Below, my parents squared into fighting stances. The portcullis slid open. Four minions rushed in. Before backing away from the pit, I saw Dad wheel a hook kick that cracked a minion’s jaw. With a judo hip throw, Mom smashed a charging man into the ground. Fulvia grabbed the black book.

“Let’s go!” she yelled. And we were off.

Using our quantum ninjutsu skills, we slinked through the corridors at speed, blending into the shadows, dodging squads of minions on the move. With alarm sirens still blaring, we hid in a storage closet to allow a patrol to pass.

“What an honor to see Agents Choi in action,” said Fulvia. “And the way they finish each other’s sentences? It’s so sweet. What’s it like, being their son?”

“They’re just Mom and Dad to me.”

We snuck out and followed a sign directing us to the hangar.

“Your mother is such a lucky woman. Your father is so dashing and supportive. Not like my last boyfriend. I love duck confit.”

“Uh-huh.”

We hunkered behind a pallet of Corrupto brand ammunition and watched a jeep drive through a tunnel.

“I don’t suppose,” said Fulvia, “your father has a younger brother who’s single and maybe around twenty-two?”

“No.”

We paused as a personnel carrier came out of the tunnel.

“I don’t suppose,” said Fulvia again, “you have an older brother who’s single and maybe around twenty-two?”

“What?!”

“Never mind. C’mon!”

After a few more twists and turns, we finally gained the hangar. On the opposite wall about a fifty yards away was a single Lear jet. Dad and Mom had beaten us there: man, they were good! After knocking out two guards, they mounted the plane’s air stairs.

“My dad can pilot that aircraft,” I said.

“Of course he can,” Fulvia cooed.

“Let’s go!”

But we weren’t halfway across the floor when we heard a familiar booming voice:

“You ruined my murder bears!”

At the hangar doors was Captain Corrupto, now in a skintight green catsuit, standing atop a palanquin shouldered by four huge minion bearers. I glanced at Dad in the cockpit as he looked up at us. Mom rushed to the jet’s side door. But in the middle of the hangar, Fulvia and I were sitting ducks. Corrupto pointed at us.

“Seize them!” she screamed, then plopped onto the covered sedan chair, and sipped a mojito. They ran. We ran. The race was on!

Given their farther distance, Corrupto’s choice of vehicle would seem to pre-doom any efforts to cut us off from the jet. How wrong I was. Her bearers must have medaled in the 4x100 relay at the Minion Olympics, because they shattered the land speed record for flunky-powered locomotion.

Corrupto shrieked via megaphone: “Gimme back my black book, you poltroons!”

The galloping litter was nearly upon us.

“We’re not going to make it!” I yelled.

“We’re not,” said Fulvia, “but you will.” She stopped and tossed me the black book: “I can’t break up your family. Just go!” Off she dashed to the storming palanquin. She was acting as a decoy and sacrificing herself!

“No!” I lit after her and reached into my coat pocket: they were still there. Fulvia and the palanquin were nearly eye to eye and coming to a halt. I charged forward and tore the paper straps off both bundles of currency.

“Merry Christmas!” I hollered and threw.

Up went the money in a great fanning arc. The stacks blossomed into a fluttering twenty-thousand-dollar cloud. The minions didn’t think twice. Down went the palanquin with a bang. Then the henchmen leapt, grappled, and scrapped over each other to nab their Christmas bonuses.

What I had not expected to see was Captain Corrupto herself launching from her chair like an air-to-air missile and rocketing headfirst into the billow of flashing money. A battle royale between boss and subordinates quickly ensued. Amid her cash grab, the captain morphed into a spinning pinwheel of karate chops, kung fu kicks, and other questionable labor practices.

“Get back to work, you goldbricking deadbeats!” thundered the Scroogiest of supervillains.

Fulvia and I bolted away and into the jet, where Mom greeted me with a hug and Dad piloted our take-off. We had secured the Naughty Or Nice list and escaped. Mission accomplished, ladies and gentlemen: Christmas was saved!

Was Santa Claus pleased? Let’s put it this way. When I woke up that Christmas morning, parked outside the family home was a brand-new Aston-Martin station wagon.