Operation Hail Storm

Fairfax, Virginia ― Mansion on the Chain Bridge Road

The poor little rich girl went home to her mansion; at least she was sure that’s what her fellow workers at the CIA thought of her. And she couldn’t argue the fact. It was true; all of it except for the fact that she was not little. At five-eleven she was taller than most women, but the rest was true. She was rich. Well, to be exact her parents had been rich. Being the only child, when they had died, then she had inherited it all. Everything. The Virginia mansion, the vacation homes, the cars and the millions.

But when her rich neighbors walked by the mansion, walking their dog Fifi or Fufu, they would probably assume that the property was vacant or maybe even abandoned. The only reason they would suspect that someone was living in the estate would be the dirty McLaren F1 her father had driven and her mother’s Pagani Huayra. The luxury car and supercar sat unused on the circular paved driveway, neglected to the point where they were literally rotting away. She drove the dirty Aston Martin One-77, that was only a tad cleaner than the more expensive cars.

The poor little rich girl had never been one of the tidiest people in the world. She never had to be. Even as a young little rich girl, she could never recall a time when there hadn’t been a maid around to pick up anything she had dropped onto her bedroom floor. She would leave a huge mess in her bathroom and minutes later she would come back from getting clothes out of her massive walk-in closet, and the bathroom would look like brand new. It was kind of spooky. It was like little cleaning ghosts were always floating around the mansion just looking for messes to ascend upon. For the longest time, she thought that Mr. Clean, the guy who did those funny old commercials for some cleaning liquid, was real. She thought he lived in the mansion and followed around behind her, magically cleaning messes she had made.

When her parents had died, all the upkeep on the mansion just kind of went away. The sad little rich girl neglected opening mail and paying bills and one day those ghosts just stopped cleaning. The outside ghosts that mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges and tended to the pool and cleaned the scum out of the pond and all the other things that grew and grew stale, well, they all went away too. The yards encircling the mansion were overgrown to the point where trick-or-treaters were too scared to walk up and ring the bell. Not knowing how to clean clothes, make food or most of the other skills humans learn when growing up, she was operating in a world that was very foreign to her. She bought clothes and threw them away when they were dirty. She ate at restaurants or picked up take-out to eat at home. And all of those workarounds made her feel like she was dumb, that she was not a real person. She had been the beautiful doll that had been kept in the immaculate doll house her entire life. And dolls didn’t have to know how to do anything. Everyone knew that.

The poor little rich girl had turned into an unhappy little rich girl. She had become consumed by the death of her parents. They were good people. Wonderful parents. She knew they had cared about her a great deal and had always told her how much they had loved her. When they had died, the purpose of the poor little rich girl had died as well.

Like everything else in her world, her life had already been planned for her. She didn’t have to worry about that task. She would go onto college and become a famous doctor like her father or maybe even a real estate mogul like her mom. That’s the way her parents had told her that things would work out, and she always believed that. Her parents had always been in control and very much in charge of their own lives. Therefore, when they said something would happen, it normally did. But her folks didn’t count on a natural skillset being ensconced in their child’s DNA. And that was the ability to learn languages very quickly.

So what are parents supposed to do when they plan for one thing, and then a natural talent pops up and their plans go askew? It probably happened to other kids who weren’t poor little rich kids. Boys who could throw a football or shoot a basketball into a hoop were redirected into such ball throwing and basketball shooting occupations.

Her parents would have liked her to do something other than learn languages, but a skill is a skill and her particular skill did have value associated with it. Not the kind of value that could make millions of dollars, but then she didn’t really need to have a profession that made a lot of money. After all, she would inherit all her parents’ money if they were to ever die. But long before that, she would marry Richie Rich and go on to live her fairytale life.

Now the poor little rich girl was all by her lonesome in the big world. No one to clean up her messes. No one to mow the lawns. No one to advise her on what to do or how to do it. The only thing she had to go on was instinct, and her instinct told her to avenge her mother’s and her father’s death. Her instinct was not to save lives, in contrast to what her father had spent his career doing. Her instinct, her overwhelming desire, was to take the lives of those responsible for screwing up her life so badly. The only thing she had truly taken responsibility for in her entire life, was leaving college and joining the CIA, hoping her looks and language skills could get her close to those she longed to kill.

Someday it would happen. No long from now, she would find those responsible for her parent’s death, and then she would not be the poor little rich girl any longer.

She would be the happy assassin and she would make sure that there was no one left alive to clean up that mess.