by S. C. Abbey
“Absolutely nothing,” said Spector nonchalantly. “We just like to stick our noses into everything. And I assure you, Harvey, this was not the way I had planned for us to meet—”
“Planned?” asked Harvey, scratching his nose. He still didn’t understand what was going on. “Why is there a need to plan for that?”
Spector sighed and stood as Katie tightened her grip on her gun. “I guess I haven’t formally introduced myself. My name is Spector, Alastair Spector,” he said, holding out a hand to Harvey. “Lovely to finally properly meet you, Harvey.”
“Alastair—” Harvey couldn’t have looked more taken aback. “D-DAD?!”
Chapter 33
AGENT LINARD HAMMERED the surface of the dashboard with his clenched fist, his face scrunched in frustration.
“Why did you let him go?!” he exploded.
Agent Michel drove in silence. He understood Linard’s dissatisfaction with the way he had dealt with the event—no one liked to be manhandled after all. They had called for backup as soon as Maksim had slipped away. It was a mess. The museum director’s safe was cleared out. His wife was murdered in cold blood—shot in the head. And on top of it all, they got their asses kicked on their home ground by an unknown hired gun. They had left after the swarm of local authorities and press arrived in their siren-lit vehicles and satellite trucks. The police would have to handle the crime scene. For now, they had more important matters to attend to.
“You should have taken the shot! He’s a damn terrorist,” continued Linard. He was clearly not going to let it go anytime soon.
Michel sighed, a pulsing vein in his temple worsened and annoyed him. He could really use some peace and quiet right now. He glanced at his hands, which were resting on the outer part of the steering wheel, and realized that they were still shaking, though not as badly as before. He tried willing them to stop to no avail. He gave up trying—they would recover, it was only a matter of time.
“Michel! Are you listening to me?!” said Linard, bouncing in his seat in rage.
“And then what?” It started off as a whisper. But he soon found himself shouting, “THEN WHAT?! What would you have me do instead? Watch him kill my partner? And then perish in the process of trying to kill him? Is that what you wish had happened instead?”
Linard glared at his partner, but didn’t argue with him. He then exhaled loudly through his nose and slumped into his seat, facing out the window. The street lamps passed by rhythmically.
“I doubt we could have done anything else and lived to talk about it,” said Michel, finally breaking his silence. “That man, I’ve never crossed paths with anyone like him. He could probably eat us for dinner and spit out our bones if he wanted to.” He was actually extremely relieved they had managed to escape unscathed, but he didn’t feel the need to spell it out.
The faint tone of a text message sounded. Linard sluggishly took his cell phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen. He unlocked it to read the text.
“They found Pachis,” he said as he sat up straight, the anger from before had substantially subsided.
“They found him?” asked Michel with a slight scowl.
“In a back alley, close to the Acropolis Museum,” continued Linard. “He’s alive, but barely—multiple fractured ribs, broken bones, and a messed-up face—he’s lucky to be alive. He’s at the hospital now.”
Michel contemplated in silence. What in the world was going on, he thought. The NIS seemed to be getting their butts kicked everywhere they went. Athens was their playground, he couldn’t allow all this to happen. It was time to do something about it. He slowed down at a traffic junction to make a U-turn. The light turned green in his favor.
“This is going too far, it’s about time we talked to the boss. I need to know what’s in that bloody box that’s almost causing NIS agents to drop dead like flies—”
Chapter 34
“WE ARE CLOSED for the day! Come back again tomorrow!” the small man with cropped black-and-gray hair shouted from behind the counter. He had heard the sound of the door opening while kneeling and arranging the boxes that lay in the cabinet under the glass counter, and assumed someone had stepped into his pawn shop.
His announcement went unanswered. Feeling curious, he stood from his position and found himself facing the end of the barrel of a pistol yet again—the second time that day. Except this time, the pistol was held by a man with dirty-blond hair and steel-gray eyes that seemed to pierce through his very soul. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to be so lucky this time.
“I’m looking for an ordinary-looking wooden box, my friend—”
Chapter 35
“YOUR DAD?” CRIED Katie at Harvey’s outburst. She lowered her firearm unconsciously, as though her arms had momentarily lost their will to hold up any weight.
Harvey remained in a state of flabbergast. It was as if someone had reached in and turned off the switch to his brain. He looked exactly like a mannequin, except they probably weren’t made in such dumbfounded expressions.
Katie mirrored Harvey’s facial contortion, but swung her head between Harvey and Spector incessantly. “But I thought—Alastair Nolan—Spector?!” She was starting to sound somewhat incoherent. She settled on, “Are you a ghost?”
Alastair Spector starting choking on air, which then evolved to rambunctious laughter. “I assure you I am very much human,” he answered the unnecessary. “Spector is one of the names I adopted. Alastair Nolan died in a plane crash, Pan Am Flight 301, in 1995. I am Alastair Spector.” He tried to reach out a hand to the still-unmoving Harvey, but his son flinched away from contact. The flinch then became a step back. Spector sighed in defeat, he settled back into the couch he was sitting in before. He pointed at the bed Harvey was standing beside. “Please, take a seat.” Harvey was once again in his mannequin-like state.
“So—” Katie interrupted, sounding pretty uneasy. “Alastair—Mr. Nolan—”
“Call me Spector, please. I have abandoned using ‘Nolan’ for so long that I don’t really respond to that name anymore.”
“But you kept your first name?” questioned Katie.
“Less discernible, seldom used anyway,” Spector said.
Katie didn’t look like she agreed. She stole a glance at Harvey with a look of concern before she continued. “Spector,” she said, “if you don’t mind me asking—”
“Where have you been?” Harvey blurted.
Spector didn’t reply immediately. He always knew this day would come. The day his son would ask him where the hell he had been all these years, not fulfilling the duties of being a father—the one thing he had been yearning so terribly to accomplish. Why in the world had he left him with a stranger in a faraway, unfamiliar land? Why had he kept the truth from him for so long? And plenty other significant questions he was sure an orphaned boy would have in his mind. Spector didn’t know where to start, whether his excuses were plausible.
I don’t know how to redeem myself. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. He knew he only had one real shot at making this work, at not losing his son again. Spector finally opened his mouth again.
“You have your mother’s eyes,” he said, staring at the shimmering, powder-blue eyes of his son reflecting the light from the harsh, suspended light bulb. He gave a good, long pause before beginning again. “Do you remember the day we went to that traveling circus, Harvey? You, your mother, your brother, and I—just the four of us?”
“The one you won three plush toys at the cowboy shoot-out stall, one for us each,” replied Harvey. “October 10th, 1993.” Harvey’s eyes gleamed with a sheer layer of tears that threatened to fall but didn’t—he blinked them away.
“A Sunday,” Spector added. “I had been away for a seven-month work trip and had just returned the Friday before. The longest I’d been away from my family, the longest I’d been away from you.”
Spector shifted in his seat. “You see, Harvey, I work as a s
py. An MI6 operative.”
Harvey sniffled and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. He didn’t seem surprised, he simply looked apathetic about what Spector had just said. Katie, on the other hand, looked considerably engrossed.
“A spy—” she said.
“That summer before we were watching animals perform acrobatic tricks in that magnificent tent, I was infiltrating a neo-Nazi organization called Die Aufgehende Sonne, a.k.a. The Rising Sun. They had branched out of faltering pro-Nazi groups from what was left in the larger cities of Germany and continued to fester in the shadows and pretense of world peace,” Spector said.
“We read about them, in the academy,” said Katie, “back when I was with the FBI. They were wiped out in the mid-nineties, no?”
“You can no sooner eradicate such recklessness than you can annihilate all the cockroaches from the streets of Bangkok,” said Spector. “Men are easy to kill, ideas are a lot tougher.”
“And what we had learned was the covert operation by the rather new German government was the basis of the formation of the Europol,” said Katie. “Radical groups like these are almost impossible to totally destroy.”
Spector gave a nod and continued, “Unlike the recognizable skinhead supremacist and anti-Semitic factions of the United States, the men who founded the Die Aufgehende Sonne were highly educated—all of them smart, manipulative, and convincingly clean-looking men, capable of becoming the next Hitler.” Spector took a deep breath. “Needless to say, Sir John Major wouldn’t have it. The western world had an unprecedentedly long period of peace in modern history—almost fifty years. What most people didn’t realize was that the Iron Curtain had only been torn down for four short years—in 1993—and people on the wrong side of the wall still woke up from cold sweats and nightmares, looking out their windows to make sure it wasn’t all a dream.”
Harvey nodded very slowly, with a slight scowl starting to mar his handsome features. He no longer looked as if he had his soul plucked out of him.
“The Americans sent a young man from Jackson, Mississippi, a CIA cadet fresh out of training—I guess they never intended him to return—and the Germans assigned a hardboiled former East Berlin Soviet defector who didn’t say much and smoked all day, I never got his real name,” said Spector. “The British and American governments were initially dubious about involving the Germans, but figured we had to go to Germany after all, and they needed to learn to accept the newly reunified Germany if the world wanted to move on. We were chosen based on the fact that we all could speak the language fluently, and were relatively inconspicuous within our organizations.”
Katie holstered her gun when she realized she was still holding on to it.
“Six months we walked amongst the ranks of the radical group as we watched and studied their methodologies—where they recruited people, how they prepared them, and the plans they had. I even got quite well-acquainted with one of the team leaders, a German man named Siegfried Lange,” Spector said. “On the final day of the mission, the day before the night we had planned to escape, I returned to my quarters from scouting the forests. And the young American was lying on the ground in a pool of blood. The German was being tied to a chair, his face bloodied. Siegfried Lange and his deputy were standing by the man when I had popped out. ‘Siegfried’, I had said, ‘What’s going on?’ And the German, whom I thought had to be dead by then, made a single sound: ‘Run.’ And boy, did I run.”
Spector paused in deep thought, it was the first time in a long time he had to recall the bleak events. “To be honest, I guess Siegfried never wanted me captured or killed, for reasons I will never know. By the time I had reached the fence, cutting through everybody who tried to stop me, I was so drenched in the blood of men I had lived with for the past six months, that I couldn’t tell which was mine and which was theirs. The only thought in my mind was to survive, to come home to my family, alive.”
Katie turned to look at Harvey, who didn’t return the glance.
“I thought the worst was over when I got over the fence, but it was really just the beginning. You see, the hideout was in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest town being miles of forests away. I’m sure you can imagine how bad it was.” Spector managed a chuckle. “It was like Bear Grylls, except the cameras never turned off.”
Spector then looked afar—as if he was reminded of something deeply important—his eyes narrowing in the process. “I will forever be indebted to the many countryside villagers who kept me alive, some of which I fear had gone on to lose their lives because of me—”
He returned his glance to Harvey. “The day I stepped through the door and embraced your mother, I had already been in the hospital for a month—that’s why none of you could tell.” He let out a suppressed laugh again.
“Mom—” Harvey croaked. “She knew?”
Spector nodded gravely. “And then word came one year after your mother’s death that the organization I had infiltrated had somehow discovered my true identity, and placed a bounty on my head. My superiors were of the opinion that I should take you and your brother and leave with new identities, but with two children—I really couldn’t put you all through that just because of me. I wouldn’t. And so, I faked my death.”
A silence ensued. The room became as quiet as the streets outside as the three occupants kept their thoughts to themselves.
“But how—” Katie broke the spell. “I thought you died in a plane crash? In Langham?”
“I did,” said Spector. “With a little help from the British government.”
“Why would they do that for you?” added Harvey.
“Because I offered them the one thing I had left that they wanted.”
Harvey looked like he knew what was about to come.
“I had to join a newly formed faction within MI6, Section 13. Technically, we don’t exist. At any point in time, there would only be thirteen of us, answerable only to the Foreign Secretary and Her Majesty. I’ve had so many passports and identities created for me, I can’t even remember all of them. If we were captured, the British government would disavow us and erase all record of our existence. We were conceived to engage in missions too unscrupulous to even hint that the Crown was in any way involved.”
Spector paused and looked down. “And one of the rules of this new initiative was—”
“—one had to be free from emotional attachments, such as family bonds?” said Harvey.
Spector looked up from his lap. His gaze was gentle. Harvey took a deep breath and turned to look at the bed, as though he had just realized it was there. He slumped and sat down on the mattress.
“And Bertram?” he said.
“He was the only person still alive I could trust,” Spector said. He then sat up straight on the couch, as much as one could in the squishy, soft chair. “Harvey, I know this is a lot to take in, and I don’t expect you to forgive me just because of the reasons I gave, no matter how genuine they were. But right now, what we should focus on is really the reason we are both here in this shithole of a motel in the first place.”
“Louis.”
“Exactly. So I guess the million-dollar question you want to ask is, what the hell happened to Louis Tanner?”
Chapter 36
THE FAINT SOUND of the radio could still be heard in the background, though none of the room’s occupants paid attention to it.
“It was never Louis Tanner’s to obtain—the timber box, that is,” said Spector. “At least from all the information I had gathered.”
Spector stood from the couch and started to pace the span of the tiny room. “It was Director Panayiotis who handled him the wooden container.”
“The director of the Acropolis Museum?” asked Katie with a slight scowl that reflected her confused thoughts. “But why? What’s in this damn box that everybody wants to get their hands on?”
“A powerful biological toxin that could change the fate of any country one wishes to target.�
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“What does it do?” asked Harvey.
“When injected into the bloodstream, it latches on to one’s genetic code at the cellular level and causes a permanent effect on the serotonin and dopamine levels of the body. When the nervous system is first exposed to the drug, the serotonin and dopamine levels in the body escalate up to more than tenfold the healthy range of an adult for a very short period of time, causing unexplained experiences of intense euphoria—”
“Just like heroin or cocaine,” added Katie.
“Exactly. However, after the neurotransmitter level peaks, it drops drastically, to levels way lower than normal—we are talking close-to-zero kind of levels for serotonin—and stays there. Permanently. Unalterable,” emphasized Spector. “I don’t really understand the science behind it, but I think it screws up one’s DNA—some kind of viral vector. And we all know what happens to people suffering from prolonged lowered levels of serotonin and dopamine in their bodies.”
“Severe anxiety, depression, self-harm tendencies, movement disorders,” said Katie, covering her mouth with her hand. “Oh God—”
“You can imagine the kind of damage it could do…” said Spector.
“One could create a nation of suicidal and depressed people. A country that would decline into nothing—” Harvey commented, his eyes slightly widening from the realization. “Is it airborne?”
“Fortunately, none of our intelligence suggests that.”
“But—how did Louis come into the picture?”
“Patience,” said Spector. “To answer that, you must first understand Director Panayiotis’s role in all this.”
“But isn’t Director Panayiotis kind of a national hero here?” asked Katie. “He’s known for being a humanitarian, a seasoned philanthropist, a tireless public service—”
“Perhaps it was for public service, after all. The only difference is that your interest and motivations don’t align with his,” said Spector. “Alas, let’s not speculate about things that are unimportant. You only have to know what he did, not why he did it.”