Zig Zag

by Jose Carlos Somoza

  "Professor Craig was killed by criminals from eastern Europe. Scotland Yard had been after them for some time; it was an unfortunate fluke," Harrison added. "They broke into houses, tortured and then killed the inhabitants, and made off with everything of value they could lay their hands on. But they've been caught now. It was tragic, but it would have ended there had you not begun getting in touch with each other, initiating contact in states of anguish. And quite patently, Miss Petrova could not handle that anguish."

  "At any rate," Carter said, "you won't be going home unprotected. We'll be watching you, at least for a few months, for your own safety. And we'll still be conducting interviews with the team of specialists—"

  "What if we don't want to go home?" Marini cried. "We have a right to be permanently protected!"

  "That's your choice, Professor." Harrison spread his hands. "We can keep you here as long as you like, in a bubble, if that's what you want. But there is no objective reason to do so. Our advice is for you to carry on with your normal lives."

  The expression made Elisa grit her teeth. She didn't know what a "normal life" was anymore and suspected that—aside from Carter and Harrison—no one there could explain it.

  Everyone was exhausted, and after lunch they all went back to their rooms. That evening, before they boarded the plane, their personal effects were returned to them. She looked at the calendar on her watch: Saturday, January 7, 2012.

  EIGHT months later, on the morning of September 11, she received some spam on her computer watch. It was an ad that showed a map of central Madrid, with a little clock in the upper corner. The clock was what was being advertised: a prototype of a computer watch equipped with Galileo, the new European satellite navigation system. To show how it worked, the user could move the cursor anywhere on the map, and wherever there was a red circle, localized info popped up and different music played. Their slogan read "Dedicated to you." Elisa was about to delete it when she noticed something.

  The music was the same for all the circles but one. She recognized it immediately: the suite he always played. She'd recognize it anywhere.

  Elisa was intrigued. She moved the cursor to the only circle that didn't play that melody. She heard another one, also for piano, but this was a popular tune. Even she knew what it was.

  A chill ran down her spine. Dedicated to you. Then she realized that when the cursor hovered over that circle, the clock on the ad changed time from 5:30 to 10:30. Alarmed, she decided to delete it.

  Lately, everything freaked her out. She'd spent that entire summer shaking like a leaf, scared of everything. She obsessed about her looks, which were ever more spectacular, and bought clothes she'd never have considered wearing until recently. She turned down every man who wanted to go out with her (and there were many), passed on all of their elaborate plans (some of which were very suggestive), and spent her time at home, behind locked and alarmed doors, always trying to catch her breath and calm down. And although it was a pretty grim summer, by the end of it her spirits were higher than they had been after that horrible experience at Christmas. She didn't want to take a step backward.

  That afternoon, she received the same message again. She deleted it. It reappeared.

  By the time she got home, she was in a state of panic. That one tiny e-mail, so carefully prepared (if it was what she thought it was, and she knew it was), brought back horrible memories for her.

  If it had been a phone call, she would simply not have picked up. But the message simultaneously attracted and repelled her. It was like everything was coming full circle. It had all begun with a coded message, and maybe it would all end the same way.

  She made up her mind.

  The time on the message was 10:30. She had almost two hours, plenty of time to get there. She dressed perfunctorily: no bra, sleeveless ivory-colored dress that fit like a glove, knee-length white boots, and a wide silver bracelet (lately, she wore lots of bracelets and bangles). She grabbed a small purse and slipped in a tiny bottle of perfume she'd recently bought, a lipstick, and some other cosmetics. She'd teased her hair and left some black curls down, to frame her face. She'd loved her naturally black hair. Before leaving, she opened the message and aimed the pointer at the circle that played that famous tune, verified the address, and walked out.

  The whole way there, the song played over and over in her mind and she thought of the message: "Dedicated to you." That had been the clue.

  It was Beethoven's Fur Elise.

  WITHOUT knowing why, she decided to take the metro and was so anxious that she didn't even pick up on the looks the other passengers gave her. She got off at Atocha. It was a warm night, but autumn was definitely in the air. As she walked to the spot the map indicated, she recalled another night, six years ago, when Valente had used a similar lure to get her to see that someone was putting on a show and she was one of its protagonists.

  Well, things had changed now. She had changed.

  Elisa generally paid no attention to the obscene remarks men made on the street, but just then a group of boys shouted something so brutal that she had to stop and think. She looked at herself in a storefront window: tall, slim, an ivory silhouette in high-heeled boots. She stopped, shocked. Her tube dress was so tight she might as well have been naked, and the bracelet clamped around her bicep and knee-length boots gave her an appearance very different from the one she would have liked to project.

  How did this happen? How could she have gone through a 180-degree transformation? Thinking about the night she met Valente had made her reflect on all the changes her personality had gone through since then: the student Elisa didn't care about her clothes or her appearance at all; Professor Robledo acted like she was an aspiring catwalk model or some cabaret hopeful. Even her mother, elegant Marta Morande, had said she didn't seem like herself. Seemed like a different person.

  Her heart pounded as she stared into the glass. Who was she getting all dressed up for? Who had made her change so much? Then something very strange occurred to her. Valente would have liked it.

  Stunned, she kept walking. Stunned and mystified, as if she didn't have control of her own free will. But in the end, she accepted the fact that wanting to feel desired was her fantasy, too. It might be enigmatic or even repulsive, but there was no doubt that the desire to feel wanted came from within her, and the Elisa of years gone by had no right to protest.

  The heels of her white boots clicked on the sidewalk as she approached the meeting point. She was scared, but she also really wanted this meeting to turn out to be something real. Over the last few months, Elisa's fear and desire always seemed rolled into one.

  It was just a street corner. There was no one there. She glanced around and was caught in the headlights of a car parking on a perpendicular side street. Feeling her pulse race, she approached. Whoever was behind the wheel opened the passenger door from inside. The car sped off immediately, heading toward Paseo del Prado. Only then did the driver speak.

  "My God, I would never have recognized you. You look so ... different..."

  She blushed and turned away.

  "Please, let me out. Pull over and let me out."

  "Elisa, they stopped watching us two weeks ago. Trust me. I know."

  "I don't care. Let me out. We shouldn't be speaking."

  "Give me a chance. We have to meet without their knowing. Just give me one chance."

  Elisa looked at him. Blanes looked a lot better than he had at Eagle's Aegean base. He wore jeans and a loose-fitting shirt and still had his beard. All the hair once on the top of his head seemed to have migrated there. But he definitely looked different. She looked different, too. She felt ridiculous, dressed like that. Her whole fragile existence came crashing down before her. She realized he was right: they had to talk.

  "I'm happy to see you. Really," he added, smiling. "I wasn't entirely convinced that my musical message would work. I know they've stopped surveillance, but I still wanted to take precautions. Besides, I had a feeling it might be the
only way to get you here. We had to bait Jacqueline, too."

  She picked up on the plural: we had to. Who else was in on this? Still, Blanes's solid presence, his proximity, was comforting. Staring out at the Madrid night, she asked about the others.

  "They're fine. Reinhard took the train. One of his students bought the ticket for him. And Jacqueline flew in. Sergio Marini couldn't make it." Seeing Elisa's raised eyebrow, he added, "Don't worry, he's fine. But he won't be coming."

  The rest of the trip—across illuminated highways and dark country roads—was made in silence. The house was in the middle of nowhere, near Soto del Real, and even in the dark it looked huge. Blanes explained that it had belonged to his family: now it was his sister's and her husband's. They thought about turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. Rural tourism was all the rage. Eagle Group, he added, had no idea it existed. Or so he thought.

  The sparsely furnished living room had just enough chairs so no one had to sit on the floor. Silberg stood to greet her. Jacqueline didn't. Jacqueline's appearance made her do a double take, but she forced herself to turn away when she realized that the ex-professor's reaction to her scrutiny was the same as her own when Blanes had stared at her. And Jacqueline seemed to see in Elisa a mirror reflecting her own appearance. What did all that mean? What the hell was going on?

  "I'm glad you all came," Blanes said, pulling up a wroughtiron chair for her. He took another one. "Let's get right down to it. First, I should say that I'll understand your shock, even incredulity, when you hear what we're going to tell you. It's only natural. All I ask is that you try to have a little patience." No one said a thing. Blanes, lacing his fingers together and resting his elbows on his thighs, suddenly said, "Eagle Group is lying to us. They've been lying for years. Reinhard and I have proof." He pulled some papers from a side-table drawer. "I hope you'll give us your vote of confidence. The memories will come, I assure you. They came to us—"

  "The memories?" Jacqueline said.

  "We've all forgotten a lot of things, Jacqueline. They drugged us."

  "When we were on the base in the Aegean," Silberg interjected. "And every single time the 'specialists' interview us. They drug us every time..."

  Elisa leaned forward, incredulous.

  "Why would they do that?"

  "Good question," Blanes replied. "First, they're trying to hide the fact that Craig and Nadja's deaths are related to Cheryl's, Rosalyn's, and Ric's. They'll go to amazing lengths to cover it up. They're spending millions on this smoke screen, and it's still slipping from their grasp. There are more and more witnesses, people they have to bring in for 'treatment,' journalists they have to throw off track. In Madrid, when Nadja died, the authorities evacuated the entire block claiming there was a bomb threat, and then leaked the news that a young Russian woman had lost her mind and killed herself after threatening to blow the whole building sky-high."

  "They had to come up with a credible story, David," Elisa said.

  "True. But look at this." He slid a sheet of paper over toward her. "The owner of the apartment, Nadja's friend, was on vacation in Egypt. She wanted to come straight back as soon as she heard. She didn't make it in time. Two days later, a group of kids in another apartment were playing with some sparklers they'd gotten for Christmas and started a fire. They evacuated everyone again and no one was hurt, but the whole building was burned to the ground."

  "Yeah, there was a lot of speculation about that." Elisa had read the headlines. "But it was just a terrible coincidence..."

  That's out of the question. Let me tell you another coincidence.

  She glanced at Blanes apprehensively.

  "There were no witnesses in Colin Craig's case, either. Not even a crime scene," he continued. "His wife killed herself at the hospital, two days later, and their son died from exposure just hours after being found. Neither Colin's family nor his wife's wanted to keep the house, so they sold it through an agent. A young IT executive at a company called Techtem bought it."

  "It's an Eagle front," Silberg explained.

  "They tore it down right away," Blanes finished. "Same situation in both cases: no witnesses, no crime scene."

  "How did you get all this information?" Elisa asked, leafing through the papers.

  "Reinhard and I have been making some inquiries."

  "But this still doesn't prove any relation between New Nelson and their deaths, David."

  "I know. But look at it this way. If there is no relation between what happened to Colin and Nadja and what happened on New Nelson, why go through all this trouble to demolish the actual scene of the crime? And why kidnap us all, and drug us all?"

  Jacqueline Clissot crossed her long legs, bare to the thigh in her amazing three-piece "suit" (matching choker, tube top, and miniskirt, slits in each one). Elisa thought she looked very sexy and very made-up, her black hair up in a bun.

  "What proof do you have that they drugged us?" she asked, impatient.

  Blanes spoke calmly.

  "Jacqueline, you examined Rosalyn Reiter's body. And after the explosion, you went down to the pantry because Carter called you in to look at something. Do you remember all that?"

  For a second, Jacqueline seemed to become another person. Her face lost all expression and she visibly stiffened in her seat. Her sensual appearance contrasted so starkly with that windup doll reaction that it scared Elisa to the core. She saw the answer to the question in the ex-professor's fluster before she heard her speak. "I... think ... a little..."

  "Drugs," Silberg said. "They've erased our memories with drugs. You can do that nowadays, you know. There are even lysergic acid derivatives that can be used to create false memories."

  Intuitively, Elisa knew Silberg was right. She thought she could recall, in the foggy haze of her mind, having received multiple injections while she was confined on the Aegean base.

  "But why?" she insisted. "Let's say that Colin's and Nadja's deaths are related to Rosalyn's, Ric's, and Cheryl's. What does that have to do with us? Why take us there, drug us, and then put us back? What information could we possibly give them? What memories do they want to erase?"

  "That's the question," Silberg said. "They've drugged all of us, not just Jacqueline. But she's the only one who examined a body, and none of us has witnessed a crime..."

  "And we don't know anything," Elisa added.

  Blanes held up a hand.

  "That means we do know something. We have something they need, and the first thing we have to do is figure out what that is." He looked at each in turn. "We have to figure out what it is we all have in common, what we share without even realizing it."

  "We were on New Nelson and we saw the past," Jacqueline proclaimed.

  "But what information could they get from that? And what memories do they want to erase? We all remember Project Zig Zag and the images of the Lake of the Sun and the Jerusalem Woman..."

  "I'll never forget it," Silberg whispered, and for a second he looked very old.

  "So what else do we have in common? What have we shared over all these years since New Nelson that they want to find out about, and then get rid of?"

  Elisa, who'd been watching Jacqueline, all at once felt herself begin to tremble.

  "Him," she whispered. For a second, she thought they hadn't heard her, but the sudden change in their expressions seemed to give her permission to go on. "Our dreams, the figure ... I call him Mr. White Eyes."

  Blanes and Silberg dropped their jaws in unison. Jacqueline, who had turned to her, nodded.

  "Yes," she agreed. "His eyes are white."

  THAT sickening feeling. Of filthiness, Jacqueline had said. You feel it too, don't you, Elisa? She nodded in recognition. Filth was the right word. The feeling of being stained, dirty, covered in muck, as if she'd dragged her body through the scum of a huge swamp. And yet it was more than just a physical feeling: it was the idea of the feeling. Jacqueline had phrased it well, and Elisa realized that the paleontologist might have actually been suffering even mo
re than she herself had.

  "It's like I'm just waiting for something ... And I'm part of it, so I can never get away. I'm alone. And it calls me. It was the same for Nadja, she told me..."

  Elisa gasped. It calls me, and I want to obey. She wanted to say it, but it sounded so disgusting she didn't dare voice it. A presence. A presence that wants me.

  And Jacqueline.

  Maybe everyone, but mainly us.

  After a long pause, Blanes looked up. Elisa had never seen him so pale, so anxious.

  "You don't have to ... "tell me anything ... if you don't want to," he stammered. "I'll just tell you what happened to me, and all I'm asking is that you let me know if it's the same kind of thing." He seemed mostly to be addressing the two of them, and Elisa wondered if he'd already spoken to Silberg about whatever it was he was about to say. "He appears in my dreams, my disconnects... And when he does, I see myself... doing terrible things." He lowered his voice, his cheeks turned red. "I have to do them, he makes me. To my sister... to my mother... awful things. Not for pleasure, though sometimes there is pleasure." The silence was thick; Elisa knew how hard it was for Blanes to talk about this. "But there's always ... torture."

  "My wife," said Silberg, "is always the victim in my dreams. Though 'victim' doesn't really express it." He was a large man, but suddenly the expression on his face broke like a child, and he stood and turned his back to them. He cried for a long time, but no one could console him. Elisa was suddenly hit by another memory that chilled her to the bone. The day she'd first seen him cry, standing by the trapdoor that led down to the pantry. When he looked back at them, Silberg had taken off his glasses and his face was all wet. "We separated. We haven't gotten divorced ... we still love each other. In fact, I love her more than ever, but I can't go on living with her... I'm so scared I'll hurt her... scared he will make me."

  Jacqueline had also stood up, and she walked to the window. The living room was dark and silent.

  "You can consider yourselves lucky," she said without turning around, staring through the dirty panes of glass and off into the night. The thing that horrified Elisa the most about her confession was that her voice didn't change. She didn't cry, didn't whimper. If Silberg had sounded like a condemned man, Jacqueline Clissot sounded like she'd already been executed. "I never talk to anyone about this, except the Eagle doctors, but I suppose there's no reason to keep hiding it. For years now, I've thought I was sick. I thought it a year after returning from New Nelson, when I separated from my husband and son, and decided to stop teaching and leave my profession. Now I'm alone. I live in a studio in Paris that they pay for. And all they ask in return is that I tell them about my dreams ... and my behavior." She was standing stock-still, her body clinging to her ultrashort, outrageous outfit. Elisa was sure she wasn't wearing anything underneath. "But I don't really live alone. I live with him, if you know what I mean. He tells me what to do. Threatens me. Makes me want certain things, and punishes me, using my own hands. I actually thought I had gone crazy, but they convinced me it was just part of the Impact. What do they call it? 'Traumatic delirium.' That's not what I call it. When I dare to call it anything, I call it the Devil," she whispered. "And I'm scared to death of it."