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"Then why do you treat me as if I'm still a teenager?"
"I don't think you're incompetent."
"You just think I should stick to analysis and leave the recruiting and training to you."
He cleared his throat and said, "I think that's a fair statement."
Kennedy put her hands on her hips and stuck out her chin. "Do me a favor and take off your sunglasses."
The request caught Hurley off guard. "Why?"
"Because I know your Achilles' heel, and I want to see your womanizing eyes when I tell you what someone should have told you a long time ago."
Hurley cracked a smile in an attempt to brush her off, but she told him again to take his glasses off. Hurley reluctantly did so.
"I respect you," Kennedy said, "in fact I might trust you more with my life than anyone in this world. You are unquestionably the best man to whip these operatives into shape ... but there's one problem."
"What's that?"
"You're myopic."
"Really?"
"Yep. I'm not sure you really understand the type of person we're looking for."
Hurley scoffed as if the idea was preposterous.
"That's right, and you're too stubborn to see it."
"I suppose you think the Special Operations Group just showed up one day. Who do you think trained all those guys? Who do you think selected them? Who do you think turned them into the efficient, badass killing machines that they are?"
"You did, and you know that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about our third objective."
Hurley frowned. She knew right where to hit him. He quietly wondered if Stansfield had put her up to this and said, "You think this shit's easy? You want to take over running this little operation?"
Kennedy shook her head and smiled in amazement. "You know, for a tough guy, you're awfully thin-skinned. You sound like one of those damn desk jockeys back at Langley who run their section as if they were some Third World dictator."
She might as well have hit him in the gut with a two-by-four. Hurley stood there speechless.
"You've created a cult of personality," Kennedy continued. "Every single recruit is you twenty to thirty years ago."
"And what's wrong with that?"
"Nothing, if you're talking about our first two objectives." Kennedy held up one finger. "Training operatives with the skills to get down and dirty if they have to and," she held up a second finger, "creating a highly mobile tactical assault team, but when it comes to the third," she shook her head, "we're still at the starting gate."
Hurley didn't like hearing this, but he was not some unaware idiot. He knew what he'd been tasked to do, and he was acutely aware that he had so far failed to make any progress on the most delicate of the three programs. Still, it wasn't in him to cede the point so easily. "I can teach anyone how to kill. That's easy. You point the weapon, you pull the trigger, and assuming you can aim ... bam, a piece of lead enters the target's body, hits a vital organ, and it's done. If you've got big enough balls I can teach you to slide a knife through a guy's armpit and pop his heart like a balloon. Fuck ... I can show you a thousand ways to punch someone's ticket. I can teach you battlefield techniques until I'm blue in the face..."
"But?" Kennedy asked prodding him in the direction she knew he was headed.
"Turning a man into what we're looking for," Hurley stopped and shook his head, "it just ain't that easy."
Kennedy sighed. This was the opening she was looking for. Touching Hurley's arm she said, "I'm not saying it is, which is why you have to start trusting the rest of us to do our jobs. I have brought you a gift, Stan. You don't realize it right now because you think a guy has to go through boot camp before he's ready to have a run at your selection process, and normally I would agree with you, but this is different. You're just going to have to let go of some of your control issues for a bit. What I have in that car is exactly what you've been looking for, Stan. No bad habits that'll take you months to undo. None of that stiff military discipline that makes all these guys stand out like a sore thumb when we dump them into an urban setting."
Hurley glanced at the car.
"He's off the charts on all of our tests," Kennedy added. "And he's yours for the shaping."
With a deep frown Hurley studied what little he could see of this raw lump of coal that Kennedy was about to dump in his lap.
