Trust Me

by Abbott, Jeff

  The martyr parked with care; one had to be a good parallel parker to survive in Paris, and he was. He did not weep but he thought of his father, dead two years from a cancer, his mother, who would not understand. The sky was milky with rain. He wondered if there would be cool rain in paradise; he could not remember if weather was mentioned. It felt like someone else was operating his muscles, as though they moved of a different accord than his own brain and heart. He wished for his mother’s touch, he wished he had not seen the girls in the art shop, he wished he had finished school, but none of that would matter. He was being weak. The glory that awaited would surpass all. Wouldn’t it?

  The martyr lifted a device that had once been a game controller. Wires led to the gateway to paradise. He was afraid. A tiny voice inside him screamed do not do this.

  He silenced the voice with a heaving sigh and pressed the button to the game controller.

  52

  Jane had followed him into the room with the computer. It sat on a desk, in front of the window. She went behind the desk, gestured with the gun at him to make him stay put.

  ‘Toss me the key ring.’

  He obeyed. She opened the toy, slid the thumb drive into the USB port.

  With one hand she ran her fingers along the keyboard, typing. She kept the gun aimed at him with the other hand.

  She would have to glance down if the account information appeared. He could rush her then. She would shoot him, he was sure, but if he didn’t do something he was dead anyway.

  She kept flicking her glance between the computer screen - which he couldn’t see, but which gave off a dim glow in the darkened room that lit her face with an otherworldly blue - and him. She wouldn’t kill him until she was sure she had what she wanted.

  He tensed to jump at her.

  ‘There it is.’ But Jane’s voice - so confident and snarky - suddenly sounded shaken. ‘Hidden in plain sight, that little b—’

  The window - and the world - where Jane stood vanished. A flash, like God opening an eye, blinded Luke. There and gone, only light and dust remaining. He tumbled up and down and sideways through the air and grit where the walls had been and landed against a fist of stone, rubble rained past him where Jane had stood with her rotten gun and her smug smile. Junk hammered a hundred blows into him. Everything seemed pulverized. His scream got lost in his throat and then it was done, the sound and fury gone and then an enormous, wrenching silence.

  Luke grew aware that he was still breathing since he was coughing and every hack pierced his ribcage with pain. He tried to move and every muscle cried against the bones and flesh. He could see part of a milk-colored sky above him; the roof was gone, half of it in the street, the other half on top of him. The front of the building was a memory; a curtain of dust marked where the walls stood. Smoke filled his nose. Parts of the rooftop had fallen atop him in a wide scattering. The wall had held, shielding him from the heaviest of the rubble. He blinked. Tried again. He could move his feet. His hands. The floor sagged and a fearsome crack in the floor inched toward him. Beyond that, the mist of dust.

  He rose on hands and knees now, testing the bones to see what was broken. His face hurt. His eyes were swollen, blinking hard against the onslaught of grit and the bright sun-smashing flash of the blast. He crawled away from the crack, from the edge of the floor - he remembered that he was six stories up.

  ‘What the hell, what the hell, what the hell,’ he mumbled to himself. He tried to get his bearings. The building could collapse. Would collapse. He had a horror of being trapped, entombed alive with tons of rubble sealing him away, succumbing to a slow, lonely death. The fear cut through the haze. He crawled along hands and knees. The stairs he had come up had to be gone now, in the front of the building, but there had to be back stairs.

  The floor groaned, sagged, and he nearly fell. Below him he heard a rumble, walls tumbling away. The floor canted hard; he could not see past the swirling dust. He heard the shrill cry of a police siren. Help was coming.

  He tried to remember the layout of the building. Stairs. Reception. Hallway. Offices on both sides.

  He realized he was crawling the wrong way through the gritty fog. He turned and hoped he didn’t crawl off the edge. He splayed fingers in front of him, feeling, reaching. He found wall. A door. Blown inward by the blast, at a broken angle, wrenched clean off the hinges. He fumbled forward. Nothing but wall, more wall. A dead end. No back stairs. He crawled back out into the shattered hallway.

  The building moaned. He thought it might well have been built before the days of steel beams and might be straining to stay erect, held together only by chance.

  He found another door, also caved in by the force. He crawled under its twisted wreckage and the floor ended. He reached a few inches below and found only space. Stuck out a leg and his toes found the rest of the shattered stairway. He put his weight on a step and it held. Then both feet, and he lowered himself down. He sat down on his butt, shivering. Then he eased down on his belly, snaking along the stairs.

  He slid down the top three stories. At the next one the walls didn’t look so cracked from the force of the roof’s collapse and he got to his feet. He tested the stairs with his feet. Behind him the stairway stood in a crazy, dust-choked warp.

  When he reached the bottom, the stairway was slashed apart at the bottom floor. What looked like large chunks of a smoldering car were wedged where the steps would have once been.

  He jumped down from the stairs into broken glass, burning rubber, twisted hot metal. Rubble made a moonscape of the street. The buildings on both sides were damaged as well, their facades ripped away, but their frames holding. Fire surged out the top of one of the buildings.

  He stumbled through broken brick and scorched stone. Wreckage choked the street.

  No sign of Jane. She’d been vaporized in the blast. But what the hell had happened?

  Bomb.

  The Night Road was attacking Quicksilver. They’d found his father’s people, maybe his father had talked. Or Aubrey. And they’d gone after Quicksilver with a murderous rage. They’d used bombs in the attacks at the high school and the chlorine train. And now here.

  He coughed and spat blood. Hands touched him. He looked up. A young woman spoke French to him in soothing tones. He could start to hear her words over the hum in his ears. She tried to help him walk. He saw walking wounded, stunned, a woman clutching her broken arm, an old man with a brutal gash across his bald pate. Luke touched his own face and probed a wet mask of blood. The pain in his body turned savage, like a beast awakening inside his bones.

  The young woman kept talking, soothingly in the lovely French, supporting him, and through the dust he saw the cream-colored sky.

  He pulled away from her. She wouldn’t let him go and at the end of the road, he could see police arriving, ambulances with lights, fire trucks.

  ‘Non,’ he said.

  She spoke French he didn’t understand and pulled at him. No doubt she thought he was in shock. No doubt she was right. But the police, no. They would want to know who he was. Why he was there. And they would find out he was wanted in the United States. No.

  He abandoned his kind savior with a thank-you, shrugged free of her grasp. He stumbled past the crowds that were gathering at one end of the street and people stopped him, trying to help him, sure that he was shaken. He pulled away. He staggered past a crowd that had spilled out of a restaurant. He went inside, to the bathroom, and was sick. He stood and studied himself in the mirror. Both his eyes were swollen, blackening with bruising. A tooth on the left side of his mouth was gone. His lips were heavy, like he’d taken a punch. A score of cuts along his forehead, up into the hairline, a bad one across his nose. Another one on his chin. His whole body throbbed like a bruise. His hair stood in spikes, dusty. His shirt was in shreds and he could see the red, scraped skin underneath. He felt the silver medal of Saint Michael, covered in grit.

  He washed the blood and gunk from his face. He realized he’d lost his gun. I
n the dining area he saw an array of cutlery at a service station, and selected a sharp knife. He didn’t want to be unarmed. He put the knife in his waistband.

  He went back out into the street and a man wearing an apron stopped him and in French said, ‘You should go to hospital, sir, do you need help?’

  The man’s face was full of kindness. Of course it was, Luke thought. Most people in this world were decent. Good. They did not turn a blind eye to the suffering they saw. There is good in the world, Luke thought, and the Night Road wants to stamp it out. Destroy it.

  ‘I am okay,’ Luke said. ‘Thank you.’

  He headed down the crowded street. The police cordoned off the avenues. How many innocent people, he thought. How many buried in the rubble, or killed outright. Nausea and anger shook him, vied for control. The ambulances were pulling away now, loading the first evacuees to the hospital. Surrounded by the onlookers, he felt marked, alone, as though he wandered among them like a ghost.

  And then, a block away in the milling crowd, he saw him. Henry Shawcross. Standing close to the cordon, looking down rue de l’Abbe-Gregoire at the devastation. His face might have been carved from stone. He stood on tiptoes, peering down the street, first-hand witness to the carnage he’d helped create.

  Henry turned away from the crowd, started to walk toward the ambulances that remained, where the injured were being loaded in.

  He’s looking for me. To see if I survived, Luke thought. He walked up to Henry, grabbed his shoulder, and said, ‘Are you here to leave flowers on my grave?’

  Henry didn’t move; he just sucked in a breath of surprise.

  ‘I’m armed. Are you here alone?’

  Henry nodded.

  ‘If you lie to me, you’ll die. I’ll kill you and I won’t even blink. Start walking toward your car.’

  ‘Luke.’

  ‘Tables are turned, asshole. This is me kidnapping you.’

  Henry obeyed. Luke kept a grip on his arm and under his hand Henry’s flesh trembled.

  ‘Thank God you’re alive—’ Henry started.

  ‘Don’t give me your crappy lies. You sold me out. You left me to die.’

  ‘I did no such thing. Everything I’ve tried to do—’

  Luke’s hand slid down to Henry’s and gave the little finger a savage twist. Henry gasped and nearly stopped. ‘I am, oddly enough, not in the mood for one of your lectures about me or my life. Heard that, done that.’ They walked in the middle of the closed street, away from the other pedestrians who might overhear Luke’s harsh whispers.

  ‘The Night Road did this. Yes or no?’ Luke said.

  Henry nodded. Misery on his face. ‘Mouser ordered this done. He’s no longer following my orders. I tried to stop him.’

  ‘Yeah, I can really see you called the police.’

  ‘Luke, please. I was going to walk up and shoot the bomber before he could detonate. I didn’t get here in time. I took an enormous risk in coming here—’

  ‘Spare me the heroic self-portrait. They have Aubrey and my father?’

  Henry nodded again.

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So. All this to kill me?’

  ‘And to wipe out Quicksilver.’

  ‘You’ve killed innocent people.’

  ‘This is a war.’

  ‘You’re playing at war, but this isn’t a war.’

  ‘Look around you. Look at what you’ve been through, Luke. War. War of a different sort. Fought in secret. But still a war.’

  ‘And you’re on the side of the bad guys,’ Luke said.

  ‘The good guys didn’t want me any more.’ He looked away from Luke.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is my car.’ Henry stopped by a BMW sedan.

  ‘In, drive.’

  Henry obeyed. When he got behind the wheel Luke put the knife along his ribs. ‘I drove for four hours with a weapon in my side. I hope you enjoy it more than I did.’

  ‘Luke, let me explain.’

  ‘You are going to take me to where my father and Aubrey are. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘Whether or not I kill you when we get there depends on how well you act. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Luke.’

  ‘Drive.’

  Henry inched out into traffic, headed toward the Pont Neuf, crossed the Seine. Luke couldn’t take his gaze off Henry. It was like seeing something human, but knowing that a devil dwelt under the skin. Hurt, anger, loathing, all tore at him. No explanation could satisfy. But he still wanted to hear one, in Henry’s words.

  ‘Why?’ Luke asked.

  ‘There are so many whys.’ A bit of the cool confidence inched back into Henry’s tone. ‘I hardly know where to start.’

  ‘I want to know why you’re a traitor.’

  Silence for a long while. Luke stabbed him. Not deep; but he drove the knife into the cotton of the shirt and into the soft fat underneath.

  ‘Ahhh.’ Henry didn’t scream but it was close. A choking cry. ‘Do you want me to crash?’ Henry slapped a palm against the steering wheel in pain. ‘The police might ask why I’m bloodied and why you’re holding a knife.’

  ‘Did I stutter? Answer me. Why? You owe me, Henry. For years you pretended to be what you weren’t, you acted like you cared about me and my mom.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Why. Why. Why.’

  Then the answer came, the words as flat as the blade of the knife. ‘No one listened to me.’

  It was such a petty confession; a small gripe by a small man. On such a little wheel could turn betrayals of country, of family, of honor.

  The confession left Luke nearly speechless. All the rage he felt toward Henry turned into a confusion. ‘Henry. I always listened to you. I trusted you.’

  ‘You and your mother were better to me than anyone ever was, Luke. You just don’t know.’

  ‘I’m listening now.’

  ‘The Book Club was my first think-tank. It was formed of a group of professors with international postings, recruited by the State Department. We all worked secretly for the department, doing analysis, talking with other academics in the target countries and regions we studied. We were much closer to the action than most analysts. We would conceive of new ways to acquire intelligence, to affect situations in foreign governments, and our muscle—’

  ‘Drummond and Clifford.’

  ‘Yes, they’d carry the plans out. I did some missions as well, so did your father. I did a lot of profiling of terrorists and extremists. We would write papers. But not for public release, they were policy papers. The deal was that we would never be named; we were working for State’s own version of the CIA, the one they’re not supposed to have.’

  ‘An illegal branch.’

  ‘A secret branch. None of us were formal spies, although we were trained in tradecraft; they were afraid we might get kidnapped, they wanted us to be capable of protecting ourselves. They called us thinkers and thugs. But we mostly focused on keeping our ears to the ground in a way that tapped into broad social changes that other researchers were not doing.’ He wiped at his lip. ‘We predicted the fall of the Soviet Union six years before it happened. We were ignored; just a bunch of State eggheads who were working in secret and didn’t even acknowledge our own names. We predicted the jihadists would arise after the fall of the Soviets. Guys with guns in Afghanistan would start hating America as much as they hated Russia and decide to open terrorist training camps. No one believed us.’ His voice broke. ‘I predicted 9/11, the use of jet liners as weapons, the same selection of targets, ten years before. No one believed me. No one took me seriously. Do you know what that felt like?’

  Luke did not feel sympathy for him, but it was hard not to feel a sickening pity. ‘You don’t get a pass because your feelings got bruised.’

  ‘No. It was more than feeling hurt. I started the Book Club. But your father took it over. Every good idea I had he smothered. I brought in the other profe
ssors, gave them this one great opportunity, but it was your father they wanted to follow. They thought I was just a chalk jockey, a book reader, I wasn’t a leader, I wasn’t as smart. I had one good idea, the Book Club itself, and then I was useless.’

  ‘So, ignored and unloved, you had Mouser kill them and make it look like an accident.’

  Henry opened his mouth, shut it, opened it. Like a fish looking for the cooling water. But with a knife in his side, he said, ‘Yes. No one was listening to us anyway. After 9/11 we were an embarrassment - can you imagine the damage if my predictions saw the light of day? The government wasn’t willing to risk it. Ever. So there was no successor formed to the Book Club.’

  ‘And Mouser framed an innocent man for sabotaging the plane and killed him, too. And you found Mouser where?’

  Henry coughed. ‘It was my job to profile terrorists, see what we could learn from them. I met him in prison. I liked him. He wasn’t quite so extreme then. He’s gotten worse.’

  ‘You tried to kill my father and then you have the gall to claim you care about me? Just because you were jealous of him?’

  ‘You’re just like him. Just like him. I thought you were like your mother but I see you’re just like Warren.’

  Luke let the silence build. He thought he might kill Henry right now, even if it wrecked the car and killed them both. ‘Did you kill my mom, too?’

  Henry’s face broke with grief. ‘You know better.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about you.’

  ‘It was an accident. She was driving. You know I nearly died. It was an accident.’

  ‘I feel you’re leaving gaps.’

  ‘Then go ahead and kill me, Luke. I am telling you that I would never have hurt your mother, and you can believe me or not. Kill me if you have to.’

  ‘You think I won’t kill you? Do you really doubt me now?’

  ‘I know you are fundamentally a decent person who will not kill a man who he loved as a father,’ Henry said. ‘We can help each other escape our problems.’