Vitamin Protocol

The fluorescent lights of the parking garage flickered as Marco swallowed his daily cocktail—Vitamin D for the bone-deep fatigue, B-complex for the fraying nerves, C for whatever immune system he still had left after three years of this work. Being a corporate spy wasn't the glamour of cinema. It was parking garages and stolen Wi-Fi passwords and hotel rooms that all smelled like someone else's bad decisions.

He was surveilling a biotech firm now, documenting their research into memory-altering compounds. The irony wasn't lost on him.

Every morning at 4 AM, he dragged himself to the apartment complex pool. The water was always slightly too warm, a chemical soup of chlorine and neglect. He swam laps alone, counting strokes—one, two, three, breathe—trying to exhaust himself enough to sleep through the moral hollowness that had taken up residence in his chest.

The dog appeared on the seventh morning. A massive, ancient Labrador with cloudy eyes and a gray muzzle, lying on a pool chair like it owned the place. Marco swam twenty laps, then thirty, while the dog watched him with what felt uncomfortably like judgment.

"You're working too hard," a woman's voice said from the darkness.

Marco treaded water, heart hammering. She stepped into the pool's blue glow—maybe fifty, silver hair pulled back, holding two mugs of coffee. The dog lifted its head and thumped its tail.

"That's Buster," she said. "He comes here every morning. Used to belong to the fellow in 4B, but the fellow died last winter. Heart attack, apparently. Buster still keeps the routine."

She set a mug on the edge of the pool. "You look like someone who forgot what life is supposed to feel like."

Marco's fingers curled around the ceramic mug. He'd been followed before. This was either an approach or a coincidence, and his instincts screamed it was the former.

"Why are you really here?" she asked, sinking into the chair beside Buster. "And don't give me the exercise routine. I've watched you for a week. You swim like you're trying to drown something that won't stay under."

The vitamins in his stomach suddenly felt like stones. Marco realized he was tired—deep in his marrow tired—in a way that no supplement could fix.

"I'm gathering information," he said finally. "About things people don't want known."

"Hmm." She sipped her coffee. "Buster's former owner was in intelligence, you know. Spook work. The stress killed him faster than the cigarettes. But in the end, he spent his last months just sitting here with this dog, watching the sun come up. Said it was the only honest thing he'd done in thirty years."

Marco looked at the dog, who had drifted back to sleep. The water lapped against the pool edges, rhythmic and relentless.

"I can stop," Marco heard himself say. "I think I can stop."

"The water's always here," she said. "And so is Buster. We don't ask questions."

He took his swimming gear and left his surveillance equipment in the locker. Some things were more important than intelligence. Some things were just life—a dog, a swim, a cup of coffee offered without asking what you'd done to deserve it.