by Jack Mars
“It will.” Claudette wrapped her arms around him. “I have every confidence in you, as does Imam Khalil. You have been gifted this opportunity. You are blessed, Adrian.”
You are blessed. Those were the same words Khalil had used when they met. Three months earlier, Claudette had taken Adrian on a trip to Greece. Khalil, like so many Syrians, was a refugee—but not a political one, nor a byproduct of the war-torn nation. He was a religious refugee, chased out by Sunnis and Shiites alike for his idealistic notions. Khalil’s brand of spirituality was an amalgamation of Islamic tenets and some of the esoteric philosophical influences from Druze, such as truthfulness and transmigration of the soul.
Adrian had met the holy man in a hotel in Athens. Imam Khalil was a gentle man with a pleasant smile, wearing a brown suit with his dark hair and beard combed and neat. The young Frenchman was mildly taken aback when, upon meeting for the first time, the Imam asked Adrian to pray with him. Together they sat upon a carpet, facing Mecca, and prayed silently. There was a calmness that hung in the air around the Imam like an aura, a placidity that Adrian had not experienced since being a young boy in his then-healthy mother’s arms.
After prayer, the two men smoked from a glass hookah and drank tea while Khalil spoke of his ideology. They discussed the importance of being true to oneself; Khalil believed that the only way for humanity to absolve their sins was absolute truthfulness, which would allow the soul to reincarnate as a pure being. He asked many questions of Adrian, about science and spirituality alike. He asked about Adrian’s mother, and promised him that somewhere on this earth she had been born anew, pure and beautiful and healthy. The young Frenchman took great solace in it.
Khalil then spoke of Imam Mahdi, the Redeemer and the last of the Imam, the holy men. Mahdi would be the one who would bring about the Day of Judgment and rid the world of evil. Khalil believed that this would occur very soon, and after the Mahdi’s redemption would come utopia; every being in the universe would be flawless, genuine, and untainted.
For several hours the two men sat together, well into the night, and when Adrian’s head was as foggy as the thick, smoky air that swirled around them he finally asked the question that had been on his mind.
“Is it you, Khalil?” he asked the holy man. “Are you the Mahdi?”
Imam Kahlil had smiled wide at that. He took Adrian’s hand in his own and said gently, “No, my son. You are. You are blessed. I can see it as clearly as I see your face.”
I am blessed. In the kitchen of their Marseille flat, Adrian pressed his lips to Claudette’s forehead. She was right; they had made a promise to Khalil and it must be kept. He retrieved the steel biohazard box from the countertop and carried it to the waiting Arabs. He unclasped the lid and lifted the top half of the foam cube to show them the tiny, hermetically sealed glass vial nestled inside.
There did not appear to be anything in the vial—which was part of the nature of it being one of the most dangerous substances the world over.
“Darling,” Adrian said as he replaced the foam and clasped the lid firmly again. “I need you to tell them, in no uncertain terms, that under no circumstances whatsoever should they touch this vial. It must be handled with the utmost care.”
Claudette relayed the message in Arabic. Suddenly the Syrian man holding the box appeared far less comfortable than a moment earlier. The other man nodded his thanks to Adrian and murmured a phrase in Arabic, one that Adrian understood—“Allah is with you, peace be upon you”—and without another word, the two men left the flat.
Once they were gone, Claudette twisted the deadbolt and put the chain back on, and then turned to her lover with a dreamy, satisfied expression on her lips.
Adrian, however, stood rooted to the spot, his face dour.
“My love?” she said cautiously.
“What have I just done?” he murmured. He already knew the answer; he had put a deadly virus in the hands of not Imam Khalil, but two strangers. “What if they do not deliver it? What if they drop it, or open it, or—”
“My love.” Claudette slid her arms around his waist and pressed her head to his chest. “They are followers of the Imam. They will exercise caution and get it to where it needs to be. Have faith. You have taken the first step towards changing the world for the better. You are the Mahdi. Do not forget that.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Of course. You are right, as always. And I must finish.” If his mutation did not work as it should, or if he did not produce the completed batch, he had no doubt that he would be a failure not only in the eyes of Khalil, but in Claudette’s as well. Without her he would crumble. He needed her as he needed air, food, or sunlight.
Even so, he could not help but wonder what they would do with the sample—if Imam Khalil would test it privately, at a remote location, or if it would be released publicly.
But he would find out soon enough.
CHAPTER SIX
“Dad, you don’t need to walk me to the door every time,” Maya griped as they crossed Dahlgren Quad toward Healy Hall on the Georgetown campus.
“I know I don’t have to,” Reid said. “I want to. What, are you ashamed to be seen with your dad?”
“It’s not that,” Maya muttered. The ride over had been quiet, Maya staring pensively out the window while Reid tried to think of something to talk about but fell short.
Maya was approaching the end of her junior year of high school, but she had already tested out of her AP classes and started taking a few courses a week at the Georgetown campus. It was a good jump toward college credit and looked great on an application—especially since Georgetown was her current top choice. Reid had insisted not only on driving Maya to the college but also walking her to her classroom.
The night prior, when Maria had been forced to suddenly cut their date short, Reid had hurried home to his girls. He was extremely disturbed by the news of Rais’s escape—his fingers had trembled against the steering wheel of his car—but he forced himself to stay calm and tried to think logically. The CIA was already in pursuit and likely Interpol as well. He knew the protocol; every airport would be watched, and roadblocks would be established on Sion’s major thoroughfares. And Rais had no allies left to turn to.
Besides, the assassin had escaped in Switzerland, more than four thousand miles away. Half a continent and an entire ocean spanned between him and Kent Steele.
Even so, he knew he would feel a lot better when he received word that Rais had been detained again. He was confident in Maria’s ability, but he wished he would have had the foresight to ask her to keep him updated as best she could.
He and Maya reached the entrance to Healy Hall and Reid lingered. “All right, I guess I’ll see you after class?”
She glanced back at him suspiciously. “You’re not going to walk me in?”
“Not today.” He had a feeling he knew why Maya was so quiet that morning. He had given her an ounce of independence the night before, but today he was right back to his usual ways. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t a little girl anymore. “Listen, I know I’ve been kind of crowding you a bit lately…”
“A bit?” Maya scoffed.
“…And I’m sorry for that. You are a capable, resourceful, and intelligent young woman. And you just want some independence. I recognize that. My overprotective nature is my problem, not yours. It’s not anything you did.”
Maya tried to hide the smirk on her face. “Did you just use the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ line?”
He nodded. “I did, because it’s true. I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if something happened to you and I wasn’t there.”
“But you’re not always going to be there,” she said, “no matter how hard you try to be. And I need to be able to take care of problems myself.”
“You’re right. I will try my best to back off a bit.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Okay.” She stretched on her tiptoes and kis
sed his cheek. “See you after classes.” She headed toward the door, but then had another thought. “You know, maybe I should learn how to shoot, just in case…”
He pointed a stern finger her way. “Don’t push it.”
She grinned and vanished into the hall. Reid loitered outside for a couple of minutes. God, his girls were growing up too fast. In two short years Maya would be a legal adult. Soon there would be cars, and college tuition, and… and sooner or later there would be boys. Thankfully that hadn’t happened yet.
He distracted himself by admiring the campus architecture as he headed toward Copley Hall. He wasn’t sure he would ever grow tired of walking around the university, enjoying the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structures, many built in the Flemish Romanesque style that flourished in the European Middle Ages. It certainly helped that mid-March in Virginia was a turning point for the season, the weather coming around and rising into the fifties and even sixties on nicer days.
His role as an adjunct was typically taking on smaller classes, twenty-five to thirty students at a time and primarily history majors. He specialized in lessons on warfare, and often subbed in for Professor Hildebrandt, who was tenured and traveled frequently for a book he was writing.
Or maybe he’s secretly in the CIA , Reid mused.
“Good morning,” he said loudly as he entered the classroom. Most of his students were already there when he arrived, so he hurried to the front, set his messenger bag on the desk, and shrugged out of his tweed coat. “I’m a few minutes late, so let’s jump right in.” It felt good being in the classroom again. This was his element—at least one of them. “I’m sure someone in here can tell me: what was the most devastating event, by death toll, in European history?”
“World War Two,” someone called out immediately.
“One of the worst worldwide, to be sure,” Reid replied, “but Russia fared a lot poorer than Europe did, by the numbers. What else you got?”
“The Mongol conquest,” said a brunette girl in a ponytail.
“Another good guess, but you guys are thinking armed conflicts. What I’m thinking is less anthropogenic; more biological.”
“Black Death,” muttered a blond kid in the front row.
“Yes, that is correct, Mister.…?”
“Wright,” the kid answered.
Reid grinned. “Mr. Wright? I bet you use that as a pickup line.”
The kid smiled sheepishly and shook his head.
“Yes, Mr. Wright is right—the Black Death. The pandemic of the bubonic plague started in Central Asia, traveled down the Silk Road, was carried to Europe by rats on merchant ships, and in the fourteenth century it killed an estimate seventy-five to two hundred million people.” He paced for a moment to punctuate his point. “That’s a huge disparity, isn’t it? How could those numbers be so far spread?”
The brunette in the third row raised her hand slightly. “Because they didn’t have a census bureau seven hundred years ago?”
Reid and a few other students chuckled. “Well, sure, there’s that. But it’s also because of how quickly the plague spread. I mean, we’re talking about more than a third of Europe’s population gone inside of two years. To put it in perspective, that would be like having the entire East Coast and California wiped out.” He leaned against his desk and folded his arms. “Now I know what you’re thinking. ‘Professor Lawson, aren’t you the guy that comes in and talks about war?’ Yes, and I’m getting to that right now.
“Someone mentioned the Mongol conquest. Genghis Khan had the largest contiguous empire in history for a brief time, and his forces marched on Eastern Europe during the years of the plague in Asia. Khan is credited as one of the first to use what we now classify as biological warfare; if a city would not yield to him, his army would catapult plague-infected bodies over their ramparts, and then… they’d just have to wait a while.”
Mr. Wright, the blond kid in the front row, wrinkled his nose in disgust. “That can’t be real.”
“It is real, I assure you. Siege of Kafa, in what is now Crimea, 1346. See, we want to think that something like biological warfare is a new concept, but it is not. Before we had tanks, or drones, or missiles, or even guns in the modern sense, we, uh… they, uh…”
“Why do you have this, Reid?” she asks accusingly. Her eyes are more afraid than they are angry.
At his mention of the word “guns,” a memory suddenly flashed across his mind—the same memory as before, but clearer now. In the kitchen of their former home in Virginia. Kate had found something while cleaning dust from one of the air conditioning ducts.
A gun on the table—a small one, a silver nine-millimeter LC9. Kate gestures at it like a cursed object. “Why do you have this, Reid?”
“It’s… just for protection,” you lie.
“Protection? Do you even know how to use it? What if one of the girls had found it?”
“They wouldn’t—”
“You know how inquisitive Maya can be. Jesus, I don’t even want to know how you got it. I don’t want this thing in our house. Please, get rid of it.”
“Of course. I’m sorry, Katie.” Katie—the name you reserve for when she’s angry.
You gingerly take the gun from the table, as if you’re not sure how to handle it.
After she leaves for work you’ll have to retrieve the other eleven hidden throughout the house. Find better spots for them.
“Professor?” The blond kid, Wright, glanced at Reid in concern. “You okay?”
“Um… yeah.” Reid straightened and cleared his throat. His fingers ached; he’d gripped the edge of the desk hard when the memory struck him. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
There was no doubt now. He was certain he had lost at least one memory of Kate.
“Um… sorry, guys, but suddenly I’m not feeling so great,” he told the class. “It just kind of hit me. Let’s, uh, leave off there for today. I’ll give you some reading, and we’ll pick it up on Monday.”
His hands shook as he recited the page numbers. Sweat prickled on his brow as students filed out. The brunette girl from the third row paused by his desk. “You don’t look so good, Professor Lawson. Do you need us to call someone?”
A migraine was forming at the front of his skull, but he forced a smile that he hoped was pleasant. “No, thank you. I’ll be fine. Just need some rest.”
“Okay. Feel better, Professor.” She too left the classroom.
As soon as he was alone, he dug in the desk drawer, found some aspirin, and swallowed them with water from a bottle in his bag.
He sat in the chair and waited for his heart rate to slow. The memory hadn’t just had a mental or emotional impact on him—it had a very real physical effect as well. The thought of losing any part of Kate from his memory at all, when she had already been taken from his life, was nauseating.
After a few minutes the sick feeling in his gut began to subside, but not the thoughts swirling in his mind. He couldn’t make any more excuses; he had to make a decision. He would have to determine what he was going to do. Back at home, in a box in his office, he had the letter that told him where he could go for help—a Swiss doctor named Guyer, the neurosurgeon who had installed the memory suppressor in his head in the first place. If anyone could help to restore his memories, it would be him. Reid had spent the last month vacillating back and forth on whether or not he should at least attempt to regain his full memory.
But parts of his wife were gone, and he had no way of knowing what else might have been washed out with the suppressor.
Now he was ready.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Look at me,” said Imam Khalil in Arabic. “Please.”
He took the boy by the shoulders, a paternal gesture, and knelt slightly so that he was eye to eye with him. “Look at me,” he said again. It was not a demand, but a gentle request.
Omar had difficulty looking Khalil in the eye. Instead he looked at his chin, at the trimmed black beard, shaved delicately at the ne
ckline. He looked at the lapels of his dark brown suit, by no means expensive yet finer than any clothes Omar had ever worn. The older man smelled pleasant and he spoke to the boy as if they were equals, with a respect unlike anyone else had ever shown him before. For all of those reasons, Omar could not bring himself to look Khalil in the eye.
“Omar, do you know what a martyr is?” he asked. His voice was clear but not loud. The boy had never once heard the Imam shout.
Omar shook his head. “No, Imam Khalil.”
“A martyr is a type of hero. But he is more than that; he is a hero who gives himself fully to a cause. A martyr is remembered. A martyr is celebrated. You, Omar, you will be celebrated. You will be remembered. You will be loved forever. Do you know why?”
Omar nodded slightly, but he did not speak. He believed in the Imam’s teachings, had clung to them like a life preserver, even more so after the bombing that killed his family. Even after being forced from his homeland of Syria by dissidents. He had some trouble, however, believing what Imam Khalil had told him only a few days ago.
“You are blessed,” said Khalil. “Look at me, Omar.” With much difficulty, Omar lifted his gaze to meet Khalil’s brown eyes, soft and friendly yet somehow intense. “You are the Mahdi, the last of the Imam. The Redeemer that will rid the world of its sinners. You are a savior, Omar. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Imam.”
“And do you believe it, Omar?”
The boy was not sure he did. He did not feel special, or important, or blessed by Allah, but still he answered, “Yes, Imam. I believe it.”
“Allah has spoken to me,” Khalil said softly, “and he has told me what we must do. Do you remember what you are supposed to do?”
Omar nodded. His mission was quite simple, though Khalil had made sure that the boy had no misgivings about what it would mean for him.
“Good. Good.” Khalil smiled wide. His teeth were perfectly white and shining in the bright sun. “Before we part, Omar, would you do me the honor of praying with me for a moment?”