Silent Assassin by Leo J. Maloney

I was going to say to justify myself. . . .”
    “You can still say it if you’d like,” she said with a gentle grin.
    He laughed. “No, that’s fine. But I guess . . . is there anything else you want to know? I’ll tell you if I can.”
    “Well,” she said, leaning forward, “is it the CIA?”
    He shook his head.
    “Who is it?”
    “I can’t say.”
    “I guess you can’t tell me many details, huh? Like who it is and what you’re involved in? Are you working on the . . . stuff that’s going on right now? The attacks?”
    “I can’t really tell you that either.”
    “I hope so,” she said, with a suddenly steely-cold glint in her eye. “I hope you get them and make them pay. They deserve it.” Morgan was taken aback by her reaction. She had always been a gentle soul, opposed to all violence, aggression, and revenge, always ready to believe the best of everyone. “I guess I shouldn’t have offered, huh?” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “Turns out there isn’t much I can tell you after all.”
    “Well . . .” she began.
    “Yeah?”
    “Maybe there’s something you can tell me,” she said, like she’d had something in mind.
    “Maybe there is,” he said.
    “I’ve been wondering . . . how do you manage to do it?” she said.
    “Do what?”
    “Lie,” she said. “And lie well, all the time, even to the people closest to you.” A thing like that could have easily sounded accusatory, a rhetorical question born of resentment and betrayal. But if he’d read her tone correctly, she wasn’t angry. She was—seemed, anyway—genuinely curious.
    “Well,” he said, hesitantly. He was about to be as frank as he’d ever been with her, so he thought he’d better make damn certain. “Are you sure you want me to talk about this?”
    “That’s why I asked,” she said.
    He leaned back, resting his head casually against his fist, and took a deep breath. “The first thing you have to remember is that I had training. Lying was part of my job. Part of who I had to be. We had professional actors and former conmen coaching us when we were training. We learned how to convince anyone of anything.”
    “But it can’t be just a matter of—technique,” she said. “I mean, you have to sustain it for so long, so completely. . . . There has to be more to it.”
    “You’re right,” he said. “There is. It’s—well, it’s a constant struggle, to begin with. The truth is always fighting to come out, and if you let it, it will. For the untrained, it’ll come out in overt ways—nervous laughter, flatness in your voice, unnatural or exaggerated tones.... But even if you can stop it from showing in the obvious ways, the truth can betray you in the tiniest of details, in ways you don’t expect—tics and small gestures and involuntary reactions.”
    “That’s if you don’t trip up outright,” Alex cut in. Her eyes were bright and sharp with interest, and she was leaning slightly forward as she spoke.
    “Right. Forget your story or get caught in a contradiction, and you’re toast. It doesn’t make it any easier that humans are natural lie detectors. And the more and longer you lie, the more likely it is that you’ll let something slip.”
    “So how do you do it?” she asked.
    “You have to remember and practice a couple things,” he said. “First, change as little as possible. The fewer details you have to keep straight, the smaller the chance you’ll screw up in a way that gets you killed or captured. That goes for stuff like your birthplace to what your spouse is like to . . . your children. For prolonged undercover assignments, we even used our real first names.”
    “Really? How come?”
    “Imagine you’re sitting in a public space and someone yells out your name. What do you do?”
    He could tell she saw immediately where he was going with this. “Turn to look.”
    “Exactly,” he said.
    “But obviously I’m not going to do that if I’m trying to hide who I