Zig Zag

by Jose Carlos Somoza

  They were speaking Spanish. Harrison could have hooked up the automatic translator incorporated into the surveillance program, but he didn't want to. It was clear they were recounting their tales of woe and bringing Lopera up to date with what had happened.

  He stroked his chin. The fact that the scientists had learned so much puzzled him, despite the fact that Carter had proof that Marini had helped them out quite a bit before he died. Could Marini have been responsible for supplying copies of the autopsy reports? Considering the fact that Marini himself knew almost nothing about it, where could he have gotten them? Who had leaked the information? Harrison was worried.

  A leak. A crack. Something that lets things in and out. A defect in the armor. His armor.

  Now Blanes was talking. He couldn't stand that man's condescending superiority.

  He contemplated Elisa Robledo at length. Lately, he looked at a lot of things the same way, without blinking, without even breathing, holding his breath. He was familiar with the basic anatomy of the eye and knew that the pupil was actually a tiny hole. A fissure, actually.

  Leaks.

  Undesirable images could slip out through that hole, like the ones he'd seen four years ago at Colin Craig's house. The ones he'd seen at Nadja Petrova's house. Or the ones he'd seen yesterday in Milan, on the coroner's slab. Images as foul and impure as the stench from a dying man's mouth. He used them to get off to sleep every night, and then he dreamed of them.

  He'd already decided what to do, and the higher-ups had given their blessings. He was going to decontaminate, cut off the gangrene. He'd make sure he was fully protected and then eliminate all the rotting flesh he was staring at right now. And he'd take special, personal pleasure in eliminating the flesh that had been responsible for those cracks, those leaks.

  He'd take extra special care of Elisa Robledo. He hadn't told anyone, not even himself.

  But he knew what he was going to do.

  Suddenly, the screen filled with jagged saw teeth. For a second, Harrison thought that the Almighty was punishing him for his evil thoughts.

  "Interference," the man on the left of him said, gripping the chocolate bar. "We might not have a clear signal here."

  Harrison didn't care about not being able to see or hear them. The scientists—even Elisa—were nothing more than a dim light in his private sky. He had plans, and he'd carry them out when the time came. For now, he needed his full attention on the last task of the night.

  BLANES was about to continue when something stopped him.

  "Professor Silberg's plane should be landing in ten minutes," Carter said, striding in and closing the door behind him.

  Elisa was indignant at the interruption and jumped up out of her seat.

  "Would you get out of here?" she spat. "Aren't the hidden mikes enough for you? We'd like to be alone. Get the hell out!"

  She heard chairs scraping back and Victor and Blanes asking her to calm down. But she'd passed the point of no return. Carter's stare and his rock-hard body, planted squarely in front of her, seemed symbolic: the perfect metaphor for her impotence in the face of all that was going on around her. She stood just a few inches from him. She was taller than Carter, but when she pushed him it was like pushing a brick wall.

  "Are you deaf? Don't you speak English? Get the fuck out! You and your boss!"

  Ignoring her, Carter glanced over at Blanes and nodded.

  "I activated the signal blockers. Harrison already left for the airport, so he can't see or hear us now."

  "Perfect," Blanes replied.

  Elisa's eyes flew back and forth, from one to the other, disconcerted, not understanding a thing. Until Blanes spoke up.

  "Elisa, Carter has been secretly helping us for years. He's our source at Eagle. He gave us the autopsy reports and all the test results we've got. He and I are the ones who organized this meeting together."

  26

  "ALL of my men were killed. The ones who were with me on New Nelson. There were five of them. Remember? Sickening deaths, things that make your blood run cold, just like what happened to your friends, except my men weren't so popular, were they, Professor? They weren't 'brilliant scientists.'"

  Carter paused. For a second it was as though a veil had descended over his light eyes, but then his steely expression returned and it was gone. He continued in a neutral tone.

  "Mendez and Lee were killed in the warehouse explosion, but the autopsy showed that someone had had a little fun with Mendez before he died. York was murdered three years ago, the same day as Professor Craig, on a military base in Croatia. And whoever or whatever is doing this ripped Bergetti and Stevenson to shreds on Monday, hours before Marini. Bergetti was on medical leave with stress-related psychological trauma; he was murdered at home. His wife threw herself off the balcony when she found his body. Ten minutes later, during a routine mission on a barge in the Red Sea, Stevenson was ripped apart. No one saw how it happened. They blinked and he was dead. I got suspicious when I found out about York's death. No one said anything to me at Eagle. I found out on my own. That was when I decided to start collaborating with Professor Blanes."

  "So, Elisa, now you see. No one betrayed anyone. We arranged it this way," Blanes remarked. "If Carter hadn't informed Eagle of our meeting, we'd all be back on Imnia, drugged out of our minds. But he convinced them it was preferable to snoop on us and find out what we had to say before they made any more moves. In fact, Carter's been helping us for years. He organized our last meeting, too. Do you remember the musical message?" Elisa nodded. Now it made more sense. She'd wondered about that message; it had seemed so inappropriate coming from Blanes.

  "Let me make one thing clear, though," Carter quipped. "I'm as happy about working with you as you are with me: not at all. But if I have to pick between you and Eagle, I'll take you ... and if I have to choose between you and him, I'll still take you." Then he added, "I don't know who or what he is, but he took out my men, and I suppose he's coming for me now."

  "He's taking out everyone who was on the island ten years ago," Jacqueline said. "All of us."

  "Do you see him, too?" Elisa asked Carter, trembling.

  "Of course I do. Just like you, he comes to me in my dreams." He paused and then corrected himself. "I guess I don't actually see him, because I close my eyes whenever he comes."

  He stepped back and loosened the knot on his tie as he spoke.

  "Eagle is lying to you. They're not trying to help you at all. In fact, they're just waiting for someone else to die. I think they want to study us, to see what happens when he chooses his next victim. They did all sorts of tests on me in Imnia, too, but they trust me. And that's obviously a big advantage. So, like it or not, counting Silberg, there aren't four of you in on this, there are five. You'll have to count me in on all your plans."

  "Six."

  Everyone turned to stare at Victor, who seemed as surprised as anyone at what he'd just said.

  "I..." He hesitated, swallowed, took a deep breath, and then managed to speak confidently. "You'll have to include me, too."

  "Does he know everything?" asked Carter, as if doubting this new addition.

  "Almost," Blanes replied. Carter's jaw slackened.

  "Well, take your time deciding, Professor. We've got time. We still have to wait for Silberg."

  "I wish he were here already," Blanes admitted. "Those documents he's got are the key."

  "What are you talking about?" Elisa asked.

  "He's holding the explanation to what's happening to us."

  Jacqueline stepped forward. Her voice betrayed new anxiety.

  "David, just tell me this: does he exist? Is he real, or just a collective vision, a hallucination?"

  "We still don't know what he is, Jacqueline, but he's real. Eagle knows that. He's definitely real." He looked at each of them as if inspecting the sole survivors of a catastrophe. Elisa picked up on the fear in his eyes. "At Eagle, they call him Zig Zag, like the project."

  FOR almost the first time
ever, Reinhard Silberg thought about himself.

  Everyone who knew him was perfectly aware that he tended to be altruistic and selfless. When his brother Otto, who was five years older and an executive at a Berlin optical components company, called one day to tell him he'd been diagnosed with a rare type of cancer whose name he couldn't pronounce, Silberg spoke to his wife, asked for a leave of absence at the university, and went to stay with Otto. He cared for him until his death, a year later. Two months after that, he packed his bags and went to New Nelson. Times were tough, and he'd gone through some huge emotional ups and downs: back then, he thought Zig Zag was God's way of trying to show his infinite kindness and helping him recover from his brother's tragic death.

  He no longer thought anything of the sort.

  At any rate, until everything changed definitively, Silberg had never feared for himself. Not because he was especially brave, but because of what his wife called a "unique glandular function." He actually felt more pain at others' suffering than his own; that's just the way he was. "If someone in this house has to get sick, let it be Reinhard," his wife used to say, "because if it's me, then we both suffer, and he'll have it worse."

  I love you so much, Bertha ... Thinking of his wife brought her image fo his mind. Anyone could see that she was no longer the slim yet curvy young woman he'd met at college almost half a century ago, but to Silberg she was still the most attractive woman on the planet. Though they hadn't been able to have children, thirty years of marital bliss had convinced him that the only real heaven on earth, the only thing that actually deserved that moniker, was living with the one you love.

  For a time, though, that harmony had been threatened. Years ago, horrified by his dreams, Silberg had made a decision very similar to the one that had taken him to his brother's house. He decided to leave in order to help someone else. He packed his bags and moved into a little bachelor pad near the university that was often rented out to students. He couldn't live with his wife, scared every night that he'd wake up to find he'd actually done the horrible things he did to her in his dreams, those grotesque visions. He'd given Bertha assorted excuses: that he needed distance to get some perspective, that his nerves were shot. But then she got sick and moved heaven and earth trying to get him to come home, and he'd finally given in despite the fact that his fears were worse than ever.

  He'd said good-bye to Bertha that afternoon. He didn't want anything that might happen from that moment on— regardless of what it might be—to catch him by her side. He hadn't hugged her too tight, but he'd circled his arms around her and stroked her back (lately, her back gave her so much trouble) and told her there was a new project that required his collaboration. He'd have to be away for a few days. He didn't mind telling her he was going to Madrid to meet David Blanes: he knew Eagle would have found out by now anyway, and lying to his wife would have risked the possibility of them interrogating her.

  Of course, he hadn't told her everything, especially since he, Blanes, and the others would have to make some drastic decisions in Madrid. He knew it would be a long time before he saw his wife again (if he saw her again), and that was why their brief good-bye meant so much to him.

  But right then he wasn't even thinking about Bertha. He was terrified—of him, Zig Zag. He feared for himself, for his life, for his future. He felt like a little boy who'd fallen into a deep, dark well.

  The cause of his terror was in the briefcase resting on his luggage carrier.

  He was flying in a private seven-seater Northwind jet with a thirty-five-foot cabin at a cruising speed of 320 miles per hour. The seats smelled of metal and new leather. The only other passengers, seated across from him, were the two men Eagle had sent to come pick him up at his small office in the Physics Department of the Technischen Universitat, in Charlottenburg. For years now, Silberg had been head of a department that gave the printmakers headaches trying to find ways to fit its name on business cards: Philosophic Wissenschafts-theorie, Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte. It was part of the Humanities Division since they studied the philosophy of science, but as a theoretical physicist himself (in addition to being a historian and philosopher), he also had a home in the Physics Department. That was where he'd spent the day reading, concluding, and writing up his findings, and right now they were digitally locked in his briefcase.

  Silberg expected the men from Eagle, but he feigned surprise anyway. They explained that they were under orders to escort him to Madrid. He wouldn't be needing the plane ticket he had: they'd take him on a private jet. He was perfectly aware of why they wanted him on that "gilded cage." Carter had already informed him that Harrison was going to stop him at the airport and confiscate his briefcase. He trusted that Carter would be able to get it back, but even if he couldn't, he'd taken measures to ensure that his findings ended up in the right hands.

  "We're starting our initial descent," the pilot announced over the loudspeaker.

  He checked his seat belt and sank back into his thoughts.

  He wondered—not for the first time—why they were being punished this way. Maybe because they had so flagrantly disobeyed God's wishes. After expelling Adam from Paradise, God sent an angel with a flaming sword to guard the way to the Tree of Life. You can never return. The past is a paradise not open to you. And yet, they had tried to return. In a way, that's what they had done, even if they'd only watched it. Wasn't that a perversion? The images of the Lake of the Sun and the Jerusalem Woman (images he'd dreamed of almost every night for ten years) were the most palpable proof of their dark sin. Weren't they? Didn't they, the damned, the voyeurs of history, deserve an exemplary punishment?

  Perhaps, but he still thought Zig Zag was excessive. It seemed terribly unfair.

  The angel with the flaming sword, Zig Zag.

  He couldn't reconcile a world created by Supreme Goodness with the suspicions he harbored. If he was right, if Zig Zag was what he thought it was, then it was all far worse than anything they'd ever imagined. If his hurried conclusions, laid out in the documents he carried, were correct, then nothing could save them. He and the rest of the "damned" were speeding straight down the road to perdition.

  As the plane glided over the Madrid night like a huge white bird, Reinhard Silberg prayed to the God he still believed in that he was wrong.

  LIFE had smiled on Victor Lopera.

  He had a fabulous upbringing. Two siblings who loved him and two healthy, adoring parents. Moderation was the key to his existence. There was nothing particularly remarkable about his life; he'd had a few relationships, but not too many; he didn't talk much, but he didn't want to, either; and although he wasn't a rabble-rouser, neither did he let people walk all over him. If he'd lived in a dictatorship, he still would have been pretty much the same. Victor was highly adaptable, like his aeroponic plants.

  The only outrageous thing he'd ever done was befriend Ric Valente. And even that had been a formative experience; it helped make him who he was today—or at least that's what he liked to think.

  He'd ended up realizing that, as Elisa once said, Ric wasn't as diabolical as he thought; he was just a kid who'd been abandoned by his parents and scorned by his uncle. A smart, ambitious boy, in need of love and friendship. Ric was a pile of contradictions: he was an egocentric soul, yet capable of affection, as he proved after the famous fight by the river over Kelly Graham; a pleasure seeker who, when it came right down to it, was still a complete loner who liked getting off on his magazines, photos, and movies. Although seen by adults as a marginal character, he was attractive—and even instructive—to children. His friendship with Valente, he concluded, had taught him more about life than many teachers and physics books, because having befriended the Devil was actually very appropriate for someone like him, who was doing everything he could to avoid temptation.

  Proof of that was the fact that when he matured enough to untangle himself from that lonely, resentful, yet brilliant boy's sphere of influence, he did it immediately. The adventures they'd shared, whe
n he thought about them, seemed like nothing more than stages of his own growth. The bottom line was that he'd set off on his own path while Valente had simply carried on along the same one, complete with not-so-discreet perversions.

  At any rate, if he viewed his life as a math equation, even with Valente thrown into it, he still came out with positive numbers.

  Until that night.

  If he thought about everything he'd gone through in that one unbelievable night, he had to laugh. The woman he most admired (and loved) had told him a mind-boggling tale; some random heavies had dragged him from his car, taken him to a house in the middle of nowhere and interrogated him, complete with menacing looks; and now an obviously exhausted, probably insane, bearded David Blanes wanted him to believe the impossible. These numbers were too big for mental arithmetic. Even for him.

  The only thing he was sure of was that he was there to help them—especially Elisa—and that he'd do everything he could.

  Despite his growing fear.

  "You said there were even stranger things...," he said. Blanes nodded.

  "The mummifications. Can you explain it, Jacqueline?"

  "A cadaver can be mummified by natural or artificial means," Jacqueline said. "They used artificial means in Egypt, and we know all about those. But Mother Nature can do the same thing. For example, in extremely dry places with good air circulation, like deserts, water in organisms evaporates very quickly, and that prevents bacteria from doing their job. But Cheryl, Colin, and Nadja were mummified, too, and there was no reasonable cause: it bore no relation to any known method. There was no desiccation, none of the typical atmospheric alteration, and not enough time had passed to produce it anyway. There were other inconsistencies, too. Like the chemical autolysis caused when cells die—they exhibited signs of that, but the bacterial processes that come later never occurred. The total lack of bacterial putrefaction was very unusual... as if... as if they'd been locked up for a long time someplace with no contact with the atmosphere. That's totally unexplainable, given postmortem dating. They called it 'idiopathic aseptic mummification."