The Last Sword Maker

by Brian Nelson

  He looked himself over. His right arm and shoulder were thick with bandages. There were more bandages on his left leg, and the skin around his kneecap felt tight. He knew he had been burned there. Ryan and Jane both had baseball caps on, and he realized why.

  “Do I still have hair?” he asked.

  “A lot more than me,” Jane said. She pulled off her cap and proudly displayed the damage. Her beautiful blond hair was mostly gone, except for a fat clump on the left side. Her scalp glistened with ointment. “I know I look ridiculous, but I just can’t bring myself to cut the rest off.”

  “I just lost a little bit,” Ryan volunteered.

  “How’s Isaac?” Eric asked.

  The color drained from Ryan’s face. Jane dropped her head. That was all Eric needed to know.

  “He saved me,” Ryan said. “He grabbed me just as …” He wanted to say more, but his eyes flashed to the nurse. Eric understood. Security is common sense.

  “You know,” Eric said to her, “I’m starving. Could I get something to eat?”

  “Of course,” the nurse said.

  As soon as the door was shut, they began to tell him what happened. “You carried me?” he asked Jane. “How?”

  “Fireman’s carry,” she replied matter-of-factly. Eric was impressed. He outweighed her by at least forty pounds. “I’m sure the adrenaline helped,” she added.

  “Well, however you did it, thanks.”

  “Well, you saved my life, too,” she said. “If you hadn’t thrown me into that doorway …” She trailed off, not wanting to say it. Then she smiled. “So we’re even.”

  Eric grinned. “Sure,” he said.

  They explained that Isaac had shielded Ryan, but that meant he’d taken the full force of the blast. Both he and Ryan had been blown through the glass doors of the library. Ryan wouldn’t say any more, but Eric got the feeling that the shock wave had blown Isaac apart.

  “And then there’s Curtiss,” Jane said. “He’s been acting really weird. He’s been coming to check on you, acting really concerned. But the night of the fire, he was furious. He wanted to know what the hell we were doing in the library. He said we could have ruined everything.

  “And that’s not all. Something else happened that night. Behrmann’s in the hospital, too. They say he had appendicitis, but I don’t buy it. Something happened at Eastman’s house. They’ve had work crews over there fixing it up.”

  A nurse came in with a sandwich and some juice, and they couldn’t talk about the fire anymore.

  Eric nodded at the bandaged shoulder. “What’s the story here?”

  “Oh, you’re gonna love this!” Jane said, suddenly excited. Ryan rolled his eyes as she dug into her pocket and pulled out a plastic bag with what looked like a black tortilla chip in it.

  “That was inside me?”

  Jane nodded dramatically. “Yep!”

  “What is it?”

  “They think it’s part of the drinking fountain. That’s what was smoking when the paramedic was working on you. Isn’t it cool?”

  * * *

  The pain woke Eric sometime in the night. He fingered the switch on the bed’s safety rail that sent more painkiller into his IV. Thank God for Big Pharma, he thought. He stared at the ceiling, waiting for the pain to ease. He was alone. Both Jane and Ryan had wanted to stay, but he had insisted they go home.

  Lying there alone, he tried to make sense of it all. Jian-min had carried a bomb into the library to destroy the Cray supercomputer. That much was clear. But Eric couldn’t shake the feeling that there had been two explosions. And the electricians that Jane had seen—who were they working for? Jane had said that Curtiss was furious. “You could have ruined everything,” he’d said. But ruin what?

  Eric suddenly felt a presence. He turned to the door, which was open, and saw a man standing there. Perhaps it should have frightened him, but it didn’t.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Admiral Curtiss said.

  “No, I was up.” He motioned to his shoulder.

  Curtiss nodded. “I went for a drive to clear my head and …” He paused. “Well, I suddenly found myself driving here. How are you feeling?”

  “Like I tried to wrestle a freight train.”

  Curtiss gave a short laugh. “A fitting description.” He paused. “I’m very sorry this happened to you and—”

  Eric cut him off. “You knew, didn’t you?”

  Admiral Curtiss sucked up a breath. He didn’t feel particularly inclined to explain himself to someone like Hill. In fact, security dictated that he shouldn’t. But he had come here to make sure that Hill—essentially one of his men—was okay, and … well, he realized that Hill deserved some kind of explanation. He had almost died and that alone can make a man unstable, especially if he doesn’t understand why.

  He stepped closer to the bed, took off his cap, and tucked it under his arm. “Yes, I knew. I locked out all the pass cards except the one Jian-min stole. I thought that would be enough to keep everyone out of the library, but I didn’t plan on the four of you tailgating him and getting in before the door closed.”

  Eric shook his head in confusion. “You knew he was going to plant a bomb, and you didn’t stop him? Not only that, but you planted your own bomb?”

  “This might be a little hard for you to understand, but what happened the other night was only a minor battle in a much larger war.” Curtiss paused, as if deciding how much he should say.

  When he spoke next, his voice had taken on an edge that gave Eric a chill. It was creepy, the sound of the man’s voice. But at the same time, he suddenly realized why this man was an admiral and why men did as he commanded.

  “What I am about to tell you, you will never repeat to anyone.” It wasn’t a question. “If you do—and I mean to anyone—then I will make sure you spend the rest of your life in a military prison. Let me be clear: You will never become a prestigious scientist. No one will remember you. You will die in prison, alone. Do you understand?”

  Eric nodded.

  “I need to hear you say it.”

  Suddenly, Eric was not so sure he wanted to know. Yet, he wanted answers. The scientist in him needed to understand. “I will never repeat it to anyone.”

  The admiral’s cold eyes lingered on him a moment, searching his face, trying to validate his trustworthiness. “Very well,” he said, and he put his coat and hat down, pulled up a chair, and sat down.

  After a few moments, he began to speak. “If I had stopped Jian-min, the enemy would have become suspicious. They would have asked how we knew ahead of time. They know we have a spy among them, and they may have been able to track him through this very specific piece of intelligence. We couldn’t take that risk. If I had acted, we would have won a battle, but just a battle, and it could likely have cost us the war.”

  “But the Cray,” Eric protested. “Ryan says without it, we don’t have a chance. We will lose the war!”

  Curtiss shook his head with disbelief. God, he hated dealing with civilians. “First of all, you shouldn’t even know we have that Cray, so you tell Ryan Lee to keep his damn mouth shut.” Curtiss’s tone softened a little. “However, I agree, which is why I moved the Cray on July third. It’s safe and running smoothly in a location not to be named. I was ordered not to interfere in Jian-min’s attack. Ironically, I’ve never been very good at following orders. And I decided that as long as it appeared to the Chinese that their plan succeeded, we wouldn’t risk our spy. What’s more, the situation allowed me to eliminate Jian-min. If I had done nothing, if I had not booby-trapped the building, he would still be running around spying and planning more sabotage in order to save his parents. I didn’t want to have to do this all over again, so I made sure he didn’t come out of the library alive.”

  Eric shook his head with a reaction halfway between amazement and disgust. It was true that Cu
rtiss’s efforts had minimized the damage to both the project and potential victims. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that his life and the lives of his friends had been toyed with.

  A tingle ran up Eric’s spine and made his scalp bristle as he realized just how cold the man sitting next to him was. “You saw us,” he said. “You knew we had entered the building. You watched us yourself.” As thorough as Curtiss was, he surely had the building under surveillance. Yet he hadn’t intervened. “Was that an easy choice for you? Sacrificing the lives of four NUBs?”

  Curtiss’s face turned hard, and he had to remind himself that Hill was oblivious to what else had happened that night. He didn’t know about Johnny Cloud or Tommy Evans or Jack Behrmann. He didn’t know how it had felt to go to Stephanie Cloud’s house in the middle of the night and tell her that her husband was dead. Or to call Tommy Evans’s parents and tell them their only son was gone.

  And he reminded himself that what had happened to Hill—the blast and the fire and the loss of his friend—was probably the most frightening and traumatic thing that had happened to him in his twenty-six years of existence.

  So for a brief moment, he was tempted to explain it all: how it really felt to lose a man, to have a pain that never went away. How the pain of each death lived under your rib cage, where it throbbed for months before leaving a hollow place. He thought of telling Hill how that felt. About the nightmares, the flag-draped coffins, the times he had put his pistol in his mouth. How it haunted you and found you in your happiest moments: with a child in your arms, in the middle of a slow dance, watching a sunset over the water. The awareness that another man has been robbed of this because of the orders you gave. That he will never see, touch, smell, or feel what you are feeling now, because of you. The shame of still drawing breath. He would add Isaac Zyrckowski, Johnny Cloud, and Tommy Evans to the list that now stood at 241, and he would think of two more orphans—Cloud’s and Zyrckowski’s—a boy and a girl who would gradually forget how their fathers’ voices sounded.

  But he said nothing about that to Hill. He had said too much already, and besides, it was none of his fucking business.

  “No, it was not an easy choice, Dr. Hill,” Curtiss said finally in a voice devoid of warmth. “It was a terrible moment, watching the four of you enter that building, knowing that I had made a mistake. But to send in more men to save you would have risked their lives as well. Instead of risking four, I would have risked six or eight. And yes, if you must know, I would trade the lives of four NUBs for the project. Just as I would trade the lives of four Jack Behrmanns or four Bill Eastmans or my own life. That is what I do, Dr. Hill. I make decisions that have terrible consequences. But I do it in the hope that it protects and serves more than it hurts. Listen, nothing would make me happier than if the United States had no enemies, and the US and China were good buddies. But that’s not the world we have. The world we have is a place where dozens of groups would love to get their hands on what we are doing here, and where one country has no problem killing as many as it takes to get there first. So I’m going to tell it to you straight: there are going be a lot more bodies before this is over. I guarantee it. It’s my job to make sure that most of those bodies are Chinese.”

  * * *

  That night, Admiral Curtiss began to lay his plans. His threat to Meng had not been just an eruption of anger. No. He would do exactly what he said. It had taken the deaths of three men—Johnny Cloud, Tommy Evans, and Isaac Zyrckowski—but now the transformation was complete. The hardness had filled him once more.

  He worked through the night at his desk, encased in darkness except for the cone of light from his reading lamp on the pages of his journal. He had discovered, through his long career, that the dead of night was the best time for this type of work. The still hours gave precious space for his thoughts to entertain the darkest, bloodiest fantasies and nurture them into reality.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Professor

  May 5, 2025

  Xinjiang, China

  It had been three months since he came down from the plateau. Three months since his long night as a chrysalis in a tree trunk, hurtling through wind and snow. Three months since he arrived in Chengdu, a megalopolis that took four hours to traverse.

  He should have made it to India by now, connected with the other exiles in Dharamshala, but he hadn’t. He was still in China.

  It will be best if you stay with me for a while. The documents will look much better if you are fully healed.

  He had been suspicious of the professor from the moment he laid eyes on him.

  When he had entered the man’s living room that first time, Sonam had sat close to the door, a tiger halfway inside a cage, ready for the door to slam, his knife ready in his sleeve, watching the man’s every move. How could this man be the one his father trusted so much? He was Han Chinese. Just the sound of the words coming out of his mouth had repulsed Sonam.

  The professor, warm and friendly and effusive, had seemed to sense this and had giving him plenty of space. He kept his hands in the open, very much aware that a wild animal had arrived in his parlor.

  “I know you don’t trust me, Sonam. But please give me a chance.”

  Sonam had said nothing—only stared at him, at the room, around the house. The place was seductively comforting. Dark rosewood panels under subdued light. High cabinets of old books. Leather chairs. Artifacts and statuettes from remote aboriginal cultures. And at the back of the house, a sunroom with huge sheets of glass, looking out on a quiet stream. The sun was setting there, and the effect of it all was so inviting, so soothing, that he was sure it couldn’t be true. He had expected to travel in the underbelly of the Dragon, hidden in poor settlements, fighting for food and survival, connecting with others who had been pushed down by the government, yet he had arrived in a rich man’s house. It made no sense. This was a man who had much to lose. Why would he risk his life to shelter a fugitive?

  “I can’t stay,” Sonam said forcefully in Chinese. He was in charge here, he told himself. “I’m going to India.”

  But the professor had shaken his head. “That would be most unwise. Just imagine for a moment that you are a border guard. You see a young man trying to leave the country. He catches your eye because it is clear he has recently been beaten. You look at his papers, which are all new. That, too, is suspicious. Even his passport photo shows him with the same beaten face. Yes, the papers are technically correct, but the guard decides to hold you nonetheless. They do some checking and find out that before a few weeks ago, you didn’t exist. Eventually, they figure out who you are and they send you back to prison, where this time you will surely die.”

  Sonam couldn’t accept that. How could freedom still be so far away?

  “No, I have to go,” he said, but now his voice was not so forceful; it was supplicating. “I have to get out of here.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you go. You are my responsibility and your father would never forgive me if I let you get captured again. I can get you the papers you need, and they will get you across the border, but we have to do it my way. If you try it now, it will all be a waste. All your suffering will have been for naught. You will lose, and the party will win.”

  Sonam put a hand over his eyes and pulled it down over his cheeks, feeling the hard clumps of scars under his fingertips. He was intensely weary and now he felt trapped, hijacked by the fact that the professor held the keys—the documents and passport—that he needed in order to make his escape. He entertained an impulse to flee on his own, to set off on a two-thousand-kilometer journey alone, but without the right papers, it was hopeless. He knew no one in this strange land. Not a single person.

  “You will be safe here,” the professor assured him. “You don’t have to worry about that. Give yourself a few days to rest from your journey; then we can talk some more.”

  That night he lay awake. His eyes al
ert in the dark, the back porch light painting the shadows of the trees on the ceiling. The knife under his pillow, a dresser slid in front of the door, he listened to the house sounds and the professor’s snoring, ready to slip out the window at any moment. He had intended to stay awake all night, but shortly after he heard the 3:00 a.m. train, he drifted off to sleep.

  He awoke with a ravenous hunger that was immediately intensified by the delicious smells coming from the kitchen downstairs. He looked out the window. The sun was coming up. No, that wasn’t right. The sun was going down. He had slept through the whole day. Fifteen hours. Oh, that heavenly smell of food!

  He shuffled groggily into the kitchen, hair plastered to the side of his head, his face sticky from sleep.

  “He lives!” cried the professor. Sonam grunted in reply.

  The professor wore an apron—sichuan higher institute of cuisine—and from the copper pots and pans stacked in the sink, it looked as though he had been cooking all day.

  “Let’s see if this will breathe new life into the zombie lord!”

  He placed a small plate in front of Sonam with three tiny pieces of bread topped with something green and yellow. Sonam shoved one into his mouth. It caused a thirty-second chain reaction of pleasure as hints of butter, cinnamon, raw brown sugar, and mushroom rotated around on his palate. It was delicious beyond words. He quickly inhaled the other two pieces and mumbled through stuffed cheeks, “More, please.”

  The professor smiled. “It speaks!” He next presented Sonam with a bowl of dumplings. Sonam took a bite, and again his eyes rolled with pleasure. It was not simply that he was ravenous; they were the best dumplings he had ever tasted. He finished the bowl within a minute. “More … please.”

  The professor brought more and more, and Sonam ate for the next two hours: noodles; a stir fry with asparagus, carrots, ginger, and soy sauce; rice pudding; and a single unassuming egg that made him moan. Finally, as a special treat, the professor made tsamba, the Tibetan staple of barley flour mixed with butter tea.