The guards brought up their weapons. Gregor felt Atropos’s pistol push into his temple.
“Tell them to drop their weapons.”
Gregor did, and the rifles and Uzis clattered to the ground.
Atropos lowered his pistol. He said, “Stay calm. Nothing is wrong.” He looked at the guards, at Karl. He repeated, “Nothing is wrong.”
The jet coasted up to them, stopped. A long moment later, the engines died, winding down like a dying breath.
Gregor saw movement in the cockpit, shadows, an indistinguishable face. He glanced at Atropos; he was smiling, looking pleased and relaxed.
The door clamshelled out, one half rising up, the other dropping to the ground. A man stepped out.
Gregor blinked, confused.
The man was identical to Atropos: same height and build, same thick-framed glasses, same mussed-up hair.
The guards hitched in their breath, uttered the first syllables of questions or exclamations; Gregor remained silent, gap-mouthed.
Atropos stepped forward. The other one came down from the jet’s steps, and they embraced.
The assassin Gregor had met the day before turned. He touched his chest with four fingers and said, “Atropos.” He tapped the chest of the new arrival with the same four fingers. He said, “Atropos.”
“You—you’re both Atropos?”
He nodded.
A sound reached Gregor’s ears. Quiet, growing louder. The scream of twin jet engines, rolling in over the tops of trees.
His heart leaped at the sight of his brothers. They were standing on the packed-dirt runway, watching him bring the plane in. How long since they’d all been together? Two, three months, at least. Each had his own territory, his own quarter of the globe to administer his services. On rare occasions, when demand exceeded their expediency, they would share a continent or—very seldom—a job.
But a few times a year, they came together, not as colleagues, but as family. A chartered yacht out of Cuba. A hunting cabin in Bavaria’s Hanau forest. A scuba adventure in the Andaman Sea of Thailand. Their time together was always relaxing and invigorating and, above all, fulfilling. They were the only times any of them felt whole.
Atropos had heard of long-married couples who ached when the other wasn’t around; they’d been together so long and had ceded so many intellectual and emotional roles to the other, even sociologists conceded that these people were incomplete without their mate. That was them, Atropos, for months at a time, until they reunited and became one again.
Their father was a great assassin, also named Atropos, as his father was and his father before him. Their father had realized the potential profit in bearing twins—financially and to the reputation of his name. The new science of artificial insemination had yielded high success rates. At the time, the process had involved fertilizing three to four eggs; typically, only one survived to birth. He had convinced a doctor to fertilize eight eggs. Half had lived.
He had taught them the ways of the assassin and allowed them to experience their craft firsthand, on his jobs. Then later he had sent each of them to a different master: stealth and entry, escape and evasion, martial arts and close-quarter combat, weaponry.
Instruct one another, he had said. Become experts in one skill, then experts in all.
Only later they realized his wisdom. Not only did their talents surge, but the bond between them became as essential, as organic as the valves between the chambers of a single heart.
Their father had also instilled in them pride in the Atropos tradition. They understood their vocation, their role in affirming and growing their heritage. They were the first Atropos who could turn their family’s myth into reality. Their forefathers had built the skeleton; they were the muscle and flesh. And so they had spread out, for the sake of their name.
The tires touched down, bounced up, then came down again and rolled. Atropos tore past the Cessna that was parked near the cluster of spectators and aimed for the other one at the far end of the airstrip. He noted the soldiers, their weapons on the ground.
His brothers had done that, made sure he was safe.
He tried to avoid the reason for this impromptu meeting, but he felt his throat tighten, his stomach cramp. Coming alongside the other Cessna, he turned and nudged the throttle. The jet taxied toward his brothers.
He stopped the plane, turned off the engines, and rolled out of the pilot’s seat. He paused in the cabin to run his fingers back through his hair. It was thick and needed a cut. He took deep breaths, wondering where their other brother was, in one of the planes or someplace cooler, a morgue or refrigerator.
Hate made his chest feel hot. He diverted his attention to the television, flipping through channel after channel. After a few seconds, he was there, catching all the dialogue, every nuance the actors tried.
Okay.
He turned the heavy bolt on the door and pushed it open. Anxious hands from the outside gripped it, helping it along. His lips formed a smile, but he saw his brothers’ faces and it fell away like dried clay.
He nearly fell out of the plane, into arms that welcomed him, needed him. He pulled them close. Their heads touched. He felt their strength. But more, he felt their grief. He wasn’t whole. They were all together—all who remained—and they were not whole. He realized this hollowness would never go away.
seventy-five
While Stephen drove, Julia stayed in the back, click
ing away on the laptop.
“We have to be at the airport at least an hour early, you know?” he said.
“No problem.”
Five minutes later he pulled to a stop. “Make it fast.”
They were at the curb in front of an electronics store. She hopped out and returned after a few minutes, bag in hand.
“The sales clerk said there’s a bowling alley up the street about ten minutes.” She handed him scribbled directions on the back of a sales receipt. “It’ll take me longer than that to transfer everything, so no hurry.”
He checked the directions and got the van moving.
“Mr. Reynolds?”
Someone was gently shaking his shoulder. He felt the heat of the fire from the hearth on the right side of his face, then the weight of the binder in his lap. He had been reviewing security briefs from the various agencies that reported to the NSA when he’d drifted off. His eyes fluttered open to a blurry face in front of him. He’d found that coming out of sleep slowed with age. Now it was a struggle, like rising through water, wondering why the surface wasn’t where you though: it would be. He suspected that the easier endeavor would be to simply stop struggling and let himself sink away. He’d never had the courage to try it.
One of Captain Landon’s lieutenants smiled at him, a patronizing smile that irritated him.
“What do you want?” He straightened in his chair, folded the binder, and held it out to the kid. “Put this on the table there.”
“A call, sir. Julia Matheson.”
Kendrick noticed the cordless encryption phone in his hand. He snatched at it, feeling some resistance until the man let go.
“Get out of here.”
When the lieutenant was gone, he spoke into the phone. “Ms. Matheson? How good of you to call.”
“Atropos took Allen Parker.”
“Took?”
“He flew away with him in his jet. Took.”
“I’ve never heard of him doing anything like that. He’s a killer. He kills. What does he want with your friend?”
“Ransom? The evidence?”
“You still have it?”
“And more. We know where he went. You said you wanted to find Karl Litt?”
Kendrick leaned off the back of the chair. He felt an old familiar pang in his chest, the anticipation of reaching a long-desired goal.
“You know where he is?” His voice was almost a whisper.
“We want Allen back. Will you help us get him?”
“Yes, of course. Where?”
�
�You’ll help us rescue Allen? I have your word?”
“I will use every resource at my disposal, and I think you know my resources are considerable. Now, where?”
“Can you trace this call?”
“It’s already done. Tell me where Karl Litt is, Ms. Matheson, and you will have your friend back before nightfall.”
Silence.
“Ms. Matheson? Hello?”
He pushed himself out of the chair, grabbing the cane beside it. He stumbled and caught himself as he made his way to the door, faster than he had moved in a long time.
“Landon!” he called. “Somebody!”
He yanked open the door, startling the lieutenant on the other side. He held out the phone, like a tired and injured runner passing off a baton.
“Trace this. Hurry!”
Julia closed the cell phone and hard drive inside the locker and pulled out the key. She looked around at the bowlers and spectators, the few people at the snack bar. No one was paying attention to her. The air was ripe with beer and sweat and something like talcum powder. She imagined the people Kendrick would send, ripping open locker after locker until they found the right one. Something these regular folks would talk about for a while, then forget.
She didn’t know if Kendrick would care what she and Stephen did after he got what he wanted, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She wanted to be on the plane before he saw the data Vero had delivered. Nothing would stop them from getting Allen back. She only hoped Kendrick was good for his word.
On the way out to the van, she dropped the key in the trash.
On the 767, over the Carribbean, Stephen asked to watch Vero’s video again. Julia set the laptop on his tray table and told him how to access it. His big fingertips hovered over the keyboard like fat birds trying to land on tiny perches. He brought an index finger down, depressing several keys at once.
“Ah!” he said and carefully tapped the right key. “The world wasn’t made for big guys.”
“I can’t say I relate.” She glanced at the monitor but saw nothing but the privacy screen she’d slipped on before arriving at the airport. Only the person sitting directly in front of the screen could see the images it showed.
“Stephen,” she said slowly, thinking about what she wanted to say. “A couple times Allen started to say something about why you left medicine and became a pastor. You stopped him. Can you tell me now? I’m just curious.” She reached out and laid her hand on his.
He stared at it, expressionless.
“I killed a man,” he said. “I murdered him.”
Her hand jumped slightly. She hoped he didn’t notice.
He shifted his gaze to the window. “Back then—this was a few months before completing my MD—I was pretty cocky. Respected, wealthy family. No problem getting dates. Had a residency lined up at Boston’s Massachusetts General. ‘Course, med school is vicious. On the rare evening I didn’t have night courses and wasn’t studying or doing volunteer work at the local clinic, I hit the bars. Hard. Most of us did. We’d try to get two months of high tension out of our systems in one night.”
He paused, shifted in the seat.
“We were in a sports bar, Malone’s. Celtics and Bucks on all the TVs. We’d gotten pretty rowdy, a few of us.”
He turned to Julia and leaned closer.
“Some guy at the bar told us to shut up. Jeff—a friend of mine— he got into a yelling match with him. The guy came over, all in-your-face, and dumped a plate of potato skins in Jeff’s lap. Jeff was a wiry little guy, feisty like a Chihuahua. He just about jumped over the table to get at him. I put my arm out and stopped him. So the guy who’d come over starts saying, ‘This your babysitter, that it? Doesn’t want Jeffy to get hurt.’ Stuff like that.”
Stephen was looking past Julia, completely there, back in that bar.
“Jeff picks up a saltshaker and beans the guy right in the forehead.
Now they’re both trying to get over the table. I had to stand up to hold them back. The guy sees me rising up and thinks I’m coming at him. He gives me a shove. And of course I shove him back, which puts him on his butt, sliding across the floor. He’s up in a heartbeat, ready to dive at me. He stops and sizes me up. I got a hundred pounds and eight inches on him. He reaches round his back and pulls out a knife, starts carving little circles in the air, you know? I’m like, ‘Whoa, buddy,’ but now I’m really ticked off. I mean, the guy pulls a knife? He kind of lunges, and I haul off and plant my fist right in the side of his head.”
He stopped, thinking. His face seemed to have slackened, like a candle just starting to feel the effects of its own burning wick.
“He went down and never got up. Ever. My punch fractured his skull and ruptured a middle meningeal artery. They arrested me for manslaughter, then eventually determined I’d acted in self-defense.”
“Sounds right to me,” Julia said.
He shook his head. “I was never in danger. That lunge was a half-hearted attempt to save face. It didn’t come close. I saw it in his eyes. He was scared. He wasn’t going to take us on, with or without a knife.”
She patted his hand. “Law enforcement has what’s called the twenty-one-foot rule. It says that a suspect with an edged weapon is a deadly threat within twenty-one feet. It takes one and a half seconds for a person to close that distance, about the same time a quick-thinking cop can draw and fire his weapon. And our society’s infatuation with firearms has dulled us to the dangers of knives, which can kill with one puncture, one slash. In the situation you were in, any cop worth his spit would have shot that guy. Including me.”
He studied her face, said nothing.
“He was freaking out, angry, probably had a few drinks. There’s no way you have could have been sure he wouldn’t have attacked you. He didn’t even know, most likely.”
She saw in his face that Stephen had long ago made up his mind: he’d killed an innocent man.
She said, “So that shocked you into dropping out of college, finding God?”
“The guy—his name was Wayne Reitz. Only twenty-two. His father came to see me. He was a pastor of a big church. He wept for his son; then he told me to get on with my life, not to let what happened crush me.” He found her eyes. “Not to let it crush me. Well, I did feel crushed that I could do such a thing with my bare hands. A soon-to-be healer, practitioner of the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. There was this pressing weight on my chest.”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“CliffsNotes version: I went to Pastor Reitz’s church. I wanted to know if he really meant his kind words. How could he not hate me? He explained God’s will and forgiveness. It took a long time, but I started to breathe again. I did some work around the church, went to seminary … didn’t become a physician.”
In his eyes she saw the pain, still there like the ghost sensations amputees experience. There was also compassion and caring. It all added up to a reluctance to do physical harm.
“As a pastor, as a compassionate man,” she said, “you believe in fighting evil, right?”
He nodded.
She let the thought hang there. She smiled and slouched against the curving wall of the plane, pushed a small blue pillow behind her head, and closed her eyes. After a few moments, she heard Stephen fiddling with the laptop.
She opened one eye. “Get it?”
“I just want to watch those videos again,” he said, slipping a pair of headphones over his ears. “We’re missing something. I know it.”
She closed her eye. “Let me know if you need a hand.”
Julia used her fork to nudge the shriveled chicken breast
on Stephen’s plastic dinner tray.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked around a mouthful of something that looked like string beans.
“Huh?” he said, pulling his eyes from the laptop’s monitor. Her fork was still resting on his meal, which shared her fold-down tray since the laptop occupied his own. “Go ahead. I’m not hungry.�
�
She craned around to get a look at the monitor. It was replaying the video of the man’s violent death in the hospital. She swallowed hard. “Trouble?”
He leaned back, shaking his head. “I’ve watched the videos a dozen times, scrolled through the list of names, studied the map. I’ve got to believe they’re all components of a plan to invade the U.S., but I get the feeling I’m missing something.” He struggled to put his thoughts into words. “It’s like standing too close to a mosaic: I can’t see the big picture.”
“The camera dwells on the victim,” Julia said. “He has to be someone important.”
“That’s just it. He’s nobody. Just some poor joe who contracts—” His face lost its color.
“Stephen? What is it?”
“It’s so obvious,” he said slowly, his eyes chasing erratic thoughts. “When did the man contract Ebola?”
“We assumed it was when the crop duster flew over, that it was in the powder it dumped on them.”
“Them?”
“The men having lunch, our victim among them.”
“When did the camera start following him?”
“Judging by the times and date on the screen, the filming began on the morning of the same day.”
“That’s it. Watch all the scenes, study them. Almost every one of the men eating lunch with the victim—maybe every one, I’ll have to check again—attended his funeral. They’re there, mourning, dancing, watching.”
“So … ?” Julia said, drawing the word out as she shook her head.
“So,” he said. His eyes were wide and frightened. “How did the camera operator know which man would contract Ebola from the powder dumped on a group of twenty?”
seventy-six
Kendrick Reynolds leaned on his cane in a room few people knew existed and fewer had ever seen. Egg-shaped, like the three more famous rooms above it, this one lay forty feet below the bottom floor of the White House proper. Spartan by Pennsylvania Avenue standards, it resembled a reading room in a men’s club, with dark leather wing chairs and ottomans arranged in conversation-conducive clusters. A Biedermeier sofa and a simple coffee table dominated the center of the room. Having escaped the decorating budgets of a succession of First Ladies, its walls were white; the two dozen or so original paintings that hung from them represented little-known experiments of brutal gore or obscene sexuality by such modern masters as Eakins, Rodin, and de Kooning. If she could have laid eyes on the room, Reynolds’s wife would have proclaimed it evidence of the male gender’s inability to reconcile masculinity and culture.
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