The education I went through was like nothing I'd ever done before. In addition to learning how to shoot, not just rifles but pistols, shotguns and even submachine guns, Mark had covered the basics of dirty fighting, knives, movement in and around an urban combat environment, surveillance, tracking, and a lot of others. We both knew that two months of training wasn't enough to even scratch the surface on some things, but I was making a lot of progress. The main things Mark focused on were firearms and movement. We'd spent hours running and moving through buildings, using the ideas of Parkour as a base movement. I was honestly in the best shape of my life and I felt incredible.
One of the things that had shocked me at first as Mark walked me through my lessons was the detailed knowledge he had of human anatomy. In some areas he even matched me after all the work I'd done to become a physician's assistant. Mark had explained it to me after I had asked one time. "We both studied, but two sides of the same coin. You studied how to repair the body. I studied how to break it."
While we trained hard, it wasn't all we did. After the bandages came off of our plastic surgeries, Mark and I spent the rest of the month going around South Korea, enjoying the local food and seeing the sights. We even rented a car to go from Seoul to Busan and around the countryside in between. We left South Korea and went into the Balkans, where Mark conducted most of my firearms training. In addition to being able to speak passable Croat, he was fluent in German, and could communicate with almost all of the people we met. He chose the Balkans not because of the language, but because he knew we could cross from one country to another through poorly watched and barely defended national borders. This allowed us to fly into Athens on one set of passports and then use others later to establish histories to our false identities.
Mark Snow no longer existed, but instead there was Marcus Smiley of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I was now Sophie Warbird, his girlfriend and a naturalized citizen originally from Canada. When I asked Mark about the similarity of our new names to our old identities, he nodded. "We've spent a very long time being called our old names. The fact is, while our family names could go away, we've spent too long being called 'Mark' and 'Sophie' to not slip up and ignore when someone says something to us, or to call each other those in public. The same with our signatures. The smaller the change, the easier it will be for us to adapt."
That day, I went one better than my goal, hitting seven of the ten swinging bottles. I actually hit eight, but Mark called it a non-fatal shot, as it just winged the bottle. "In a human, that would bleed like a stuck pig, but he wouldn't be out of action, and he'd recover," he explained. "A great day for you."
I smiled, a warm feeling in my chest at his compliment. It was something that I'd come to accept, the separation of Mark, my boyfriend and love of my life, and Mark the teacher and former contract killer. As a boyfriend, he was affectionate, warm, and kind. He would do all the little things that meant so much, and in terms of intimacy.... well, let's just say I'd lost weight due to more than just the Parkour running.
But Mark the teacher was different. It wasn't that he was cruel. It was just that he was all business. He didn't break me down, but he was a focused taskmaster. If I made a mistake, especially one that could have cost me my life, he made sure I knew in exact detail what I'd done wrong and how to do it right. We would then repeat it as many times as needed until I got the skill or the action down right.
For example, when he taught me how to shoot a pistol, he didn't start with a real pistol. Instead, we started with a BB gun, learning the different parts and how to aim and squeeze the trigger. From there we'd gone up to a .22 caliber round, his favorite training round because it was not only easy to get and cheap, but because it had a very small kick. Only after I could shoot the .22 properly did he move me up to a larger round. I particularly liked the 9mm, but we both knew that sometimes I wouldn't have a choice in what we might need to use.
He'd done the same for every weapon that I had learned how to use, going from small to larger. He'd even compensated for things like learning how to handle rifle kick by stifling any sort of recoil suppression device in the smaller rounds.
We shot in abandoned old buildings, and backwoods areas that nobody would come to bother us. Eastern Germany and Croatia were full of them, and we kept on the move often enough that no local police would get curious about us anyway. It was basic training, laying the foundations for a new life, and a vacation all rolled into one.