by Sean Black
At first she didn’t know how to respond. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘We have a recording of what happened from the security camera. He killed them and then he fled. We lost contact with him in the desert to the south of the facility. Last we heard he was seen in Las Vegas where he almost killed a cop. He’s still at large.’
‘I don’t believe it.’ She said it with all sincerity. The defining characteristic of Byron was how gentle he was. ‘He’s not a violent person. I mean I know that when he was a Ranger he had to do things as part of his service. That was different, though. He wouldn’t harm an innocent person.’
Graves put his mug of coffee on a side table. ‘Perhaps he didn’t see them as innocent. What was he like before he left? Had you noticed any change in his behavior?’
This was the question she had been dreading. The news Graves had just given her didn’t help her answer it either. They were already convinced that Byron was dangerous, a superhuman madman on the loose. She didn’t want to say anything to reinforce that impression.
‘He seemed a little on edge, but he always did before he left home. It was nothing unusual.’
She hated herself for the lie. The truth was that she had seen a side to Byron before he left that had scared her. He had seemed distracted and forgetful, more so than usual. The first real sign had come about three weeks before he left. She had woken in the middle of the night to find the sheets drenched with his sweat. His body had been completely rigid, his eyes open. She had got up and called to him from across the room. He had woken up rubbing his face and seemed completely normal. ‘Just a nightmare, sweetie,’ he’d told her. He’d helped her change the sheets and they had gone back to bed. In the morning he was up and out before she woke. He used to go running in the early morning. When he’d come back, he’d been the sweet, normal man who loved life that she knew. She had passed it off as an aberration. People had nightmares. Why should her perfect husband be the exception? But she’d already known the answer.
Byron had told her that after the surgery, which had taken place over six months, his memory was fine. He could remember everything that had gone before. It was simply that it didn’t carry the emotional weight it once had. Over time he didn’t think of the girl anymore, or any of the horrific things he had witnessed. Beyond the things he could do, it was this that had made him happy to offer himself as a volunteer. They had something that could free tens of thousands of veterans, and victims of violent crime and other traumatic events, from the cages their minds had created. They wouldn’t have to walk round like zombies or take pills: they could get their old lives back.
‘Would you mind if I used the bathroom?’ Graves asked.
‘No, go right ahead.’
Graves excused himself. She was left alone with this new knowledge. She wondered whether or not to tell Graves about the other incidents that had taken place before Byron had left. She had come home one evening to find him at the window with a gun. He had pulled her inside and told her to take cover. This had gone on for an hour before she had persuaded him that everything was fine. It was only later that she’d realized he was in the midst of a full-blown flashback. There were more nightmares, more night sweats. He grew snappy and irritable. By the time he had left, for the first time in their marriage she had been glad to see him go. Then had come Graves’s first visit and with it the guilt. Byron had needed her, and she hadn’t known what to do. Now he was a wanted man.
Graves took a leak, and while the toilet was refilling, slid back the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet that hung over the sink. Behind a bottle of multi-vitamins, he found what he was looking for. Propranolol was a beta-blocker, used to calm nerves and free patients from anxiety. It was also believed to damp down traumatic memories. You didn’t forget, you just didn’t care so much. There had been a lot of disagreement among the team at the facility about its use. In the end it had been agreed to give people in the program a low dose.
Graves opened the white plastic bottle and counted out the tablets. He checked the date of issue against the number. It was as they had suspected. Tibor had stopped taking the drug weeks ago. In itself that didn’t prove anything, but it didn’t look like coincidence either. The question that remained was why he had stopped taking it. Graves put the container back, washed his hands and walked out.
Julia Tibor got up as he came back into the living room. ‘You want some more coffee?’
He motioned for her to sit down. She did. She seemed fidgety. She was holding out on him. He didn’t need sensory substitution to get that. He didn’t blame her. She was protective of her husband. That was something he could use if he had to. He sat down, leaving it to her to fill the silence.
‘I just feel so helpless,’ she said. ‘If I could talk to him maybe I could … I don’t know.’
‘Mrs Tibor. Julia. Is it okay if I call you Julia?’
She was glancing back at the wedding picture above the mantel. Maybe she was wishing herself back to that day.
‘Julia, I want you to know that we are doing everything we can to locate Byron and to bring him home safely. This might sound impersonal but we have a lot invested in him. Not just money but hope. I think at some point he will try to contact you. When he does it’s important you let us know.’
She seemed to bristle. ‘I thought you’d know anyway.’
‘We will, but it would be better coming from you. You don’t have to cooperate with us.’
‘You make it sound like a threat.’
Harry sighed. ‘I guess it is. There’s also your own safety to consider. The people Byron killed were trying to help him. They were people he knew.’
‘Byron wouldn’t hurt me,’ she said. ‘He loves me.’
‘The man in that picture up there, he loved you. The one we’re trying to find? It’s not the same guy. Not even close.’ He saw the seed of doubt take. That was all they needed. He crossed to the hallway. ‘I’ll see myself out.’
FORTY-SIX
Byron
I had no good way to get home. Whatever method I chose would involve a trade-off between journey time and risk. Hopping a flight straight from McCarran to JFK, Newark or LaGuardia would minimize the time I was exposed to a few hours but it was ultra-high risk. Those would be the airports they’d be watching, McCarran in particular. I doubted I’d make it onto the plane. My other options, driving or taking the bus, were lower risk but I’d be out there for longer. People would see me on the bus, and driving I’d have to stop for gas. There was another factor too. On a bus or plane I would be ceding control. If I encountered trouble while driving, I could at least try to take evasive action straight away. So, car it was.
I stood across the street from the Silver Dollar Casino. The valet was a young Hispanic guy called Victor. I had never met Victor. I’d left that to Repo. Chauncey had been too jumpy. Repo had had the chip of ice that delineated a real hustler from someone who had to hustle to survive.
When the other valet, an older guy, collected someone’s car, I made my move. I palmed the ticket and the balance of the money to Victor. He plucked the keys from the valet stand and handed them to me.
‘Cherry red.’
That was all it took. The car had been left behind as collateral by someone chasing a losing streak all the way to the very bottom of the deck. Victor had picked it up from a pit boss for a couple of hundred bucks. Chauncey and Repo had been skimming the slots when they’d heard about it. The Silver Dollar tolerated skimming as long as they didn’t upset any guests, left when they were asked without making a fuss, and acted as low-level intelligence-gatherers for security. It was all part of the rich ecosystem of Vegas.
I walked round the corner, hit the clicker and opened the driver’s door. The interior reeked of cigarette smoke and stale fast food. The engine turned over at the second attempt. I lowered all the windows and checked the fuel gauge. Half a tank. Enough to get me clear of the city.
I pulled out into the traffic, and headed for the western edge of the bel
tway. I used my rearview and side mirrors to watch the vehicles around me as I made my way up to the 95. I took it north-west, retracing my earlier journey. Before I struck for home there was someone I needed to talk to.
FORTY-SEVEN
Julia
Julia woke to the blinking red light of her smartphone announcing unread email on the table next to her bed. It had taken her until four in the morning to get to sleep. Her mind was caught in a loop. Graves’s visit had shattered her image of the man she had married. She rolled over and grabbed her phone. No sooner had she started opening and deleting emails than the phone vibrated in her hand to signal an incoming call. It dropped onto the bed and she had to scramble to retrieve it before it defaulted to voicemail. The number was unknown. As she clicked to answer it, she closed her eyes, praying to hear Byron’s voice.
‘Mrs Tibor.’
It was Graves.
‘Hope I didn’t wake you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to check in, make sure you’re okay.’
Making sure she was okay meant checking whether she’d heard from Byron. Her apartment had been under surveillance since the incident, she was sure: it would have been standard operating procedure. She doubted that the timing of Graves’s call was coincidental. As soon as she had begun opening emails it would have pinged, alerting Graves not only to the location of the phone she was holding but to the fact that someone was using it to open emails, and was therefore awake. She had reminded herself last night about something Byron had told her a long time ago. There’s no such thing as a coincidence in my world. And even if they do happen, you can’t assume that’s what it is. Not if you want to stay alive. Everything is cause and effect, even when it’s not.
She swept a tangle of hair from her face and sat up. Her left leg inched over, and she felt the coldness on Byron’s side of the bed. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘I doubt that,’ said Graves. ‘You sleep any?’
‘Some.’ She was starting to resent the man’s faux-intimacy. No matter who her husband was (who he had been all along?), or what he had done, it was still her life. She hadn’t signed up to this. She hadn’t traded off her right to privacy in order to serve her country. ‘Do you have any news?’
‘Not yet,’ said Graves.
‘Would you tell me if you did?’
She could hear him take a puff on a cigarette and exhale. It sounded like the rattle of a skeleton that had been hung in the wind.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Probably not. This is kind of a one-way street. Sure it’s frustrating for you. It’s the way it works.’
There was a silence. She was waiting for Graves to ask if she’d heard anything before she reminded herself that the question was redundant. Graves would either know or he would be relying on her to tell him.
‘I know that yesterday left you with a lot to take in,’ he said. ‘I’ve emailed you a secure link to something that I hope will clarify things. I warn you now, it’s unpleasant, and you’re not required to watch it if you don’t want to.’
Julia shivered. ‘What it is?’
‘Video footage from the facility. Like I said, you don’t have to watch it but if you do, and you find that you can’t get what you’ve seen out of your head, there’s something in the medicine cabinet that might help. About a month’s supply.’
The propranolol. Graves must have checked it when he used the bathroom. No such thing as a coincidence, Julia. She had meant to throw the pills away but hadn’t got round to it.
‘Were you going to mention it, Julia?’ he asked her.
‘He had been acting strangely for a while,’ As soon as she’d spoken the words, she regretted it. She had crossed a line. She had shared the sanctity of her relationship with Byron, and not just with anyone, a girlfriend or her mom, but with Graves.
‘We’d guessed that, but I’m glad you told me yourself. It’s better that it comes from you.’
Her throat tightened. She had always prided herself on her ability to keep her emotions in check, at least outwardly. ‘He never threatened me. Never. He wasn’t that kind of man. He would never hurt a woman.’
‘Watch the link,’ said Graves, and hung up.
It had taken an hour of pacing the apartment before she had worked herself up to click on the blue underlined text of the link. Graves had used cheap car-wreck psychology knowing that it would work. Even though she knew it was better not to watch, the not-knowing would gnaw away at her until she did. With the email also came a message that for security reasons the link would only remain live until midday. The email could not be forwarded; the link had to be accessed from her IP address and could only be watched once. Blink, and you’d miss it.
She sat down on the couch and full-screened the image on her laptop. She clicked the play triangle.
It was security-camera footage. That part didn’t come as a surprise. Everything else about it did, starting with the date and time stamped in white lettering at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. She recognized the date immediately – after all, who forgot the evening they’d met the man they were about to marry?
Two young men sauntered down Sixth Avenue. One was carrying the bag they had taken from Julia. He was rifling through it like it was the most natural thing in the world. He came up with Julia’s cell phone and tossed it to his buddy, who slid off the back, removed the SIM chip, tossed it and put the rear casing back in place.
They turned a corner. Another camera picked them up, its framing a little tighter. They stopped suddenly. They were wary now but the cockiness was still there.
Byron entered frame left. He had his arms raised, palms up in a ‘take it easy’ gesture. After that everything happened really fast.
She hugged the toilet bowl and vomited until there was nothing left to come up. A yellow stalactite of bile hung from her bottom lip. Legs shaking, she got back to her feet, holding on to the edge of the porcelain sink for support. She flushed the toilet, then filled a glass tumbler with water and rinsed her mouth. She brushed her teeth and swirled some mouthwash.
She tore open the medicine cabinet, grabbed the pill bottle, and emptied one into the palm of her hand. She washed it down with the last of the water and closed the cabinet. Her head was pounding.
She cursed Graves. She cursed Byron. Most of all, she cursed herself. She had known nothing good could come from watching what he’d sent her.
Opening the link, she’d expected to see what Byron had done at the research facility. In the process, she had already rationalized what he’d done. He was sick. He hadn’t been in control of himself. The body, the vessel, had done it, but the actual person wasn’t present.
What Byron had done to the two muggers was different, though. He had turned up at her apartment, a fairytale figure, the proverbial knight in shining armor. He had downplayed the risk he’d taken, made a joke of the whole thing when all the while he’d just killed two men in cold blood, showing them no mercy as they had pleaded for their lives. It was one thing to discount what had happened over the past few weeks. It was something else to know that the man she had fallen in love with was a cold-blooded executioner who had deceived her.
Her cell rang. No doubt it was Graves checking up on her. She clicked the green call button.
‘Julia, listen carefully. I don’t have long,’ said Byron.
FORTY-EIGHT
Graves
‘We get a location?’ Graves asked. He was in the business lounge at JFK, getting ready to board a flight back to Vegas and work out what the hell had happened to Eldon James.
‘Convenience store in north Vegas. He was gone by the time we got someone there. No one saw him make the call. The pay phone was outside.’
Of course they didn’t, thought Graves. ‘Okay, send me the audio.’ He killed the call. His flight was boarding. He grabbed his bag and headed for the gate. He handed his boarding pass as the email pinged into his inbox. Along with the audio was a location on Googlemaps. It showed the store, right next to the smaller of the Vegas airports.
They could cross that off the list. Whatever enhancements Byron had, they were having to deal with something far more fundamental. Before he’d entered the program, he’d been trained to the highest level. They were up against someone who knew their play book as well as anyone, and who wasn’t constrained by the same rules, no matter how elastic they’d become in recent years. Add in all the things that had made Muir and the head-scoopers cream their pants – Byron’s genetic profile, which included the warrior gene, his range of intelligence and existing cognitive abilities, and physical profile. It was all now working against them.
Graves started down the gangway to the plane. He popped in his earphones and listened to the audio of the call between Byron and Julia as he walked. As so often in life, the meaning lay in the pauses and hesitations. It was what Julia hadn’t said that mattered. By the time he was settled in his seat, he was happier. Now they had the wife on board, it was time for a new strategy. The start of the end game was in sight.
FORTY-NINE
Byron
Muir pulled his car into the parking space outside his ground-floor apartment. The security detail that had trailed him home pulled up alongside and the two private security guards escorting the scientists got out. I retreated to the bathroom, which lay at the back of Muir’s small two-bed apartment.
By concentrating my hearing I could come close to being able to visualize every movement just from the audio waves that pulsed against my cochlear implants. I could break down the scrape of the key against every part of the lock, and every single step. The guards left Muir at the door. They would wait outside in their vehicle until they were relieved by a fresh two-man detail.
As I’d waited for Muir I had been struck by how bare the apartment was, how impersonal. I had wondered why Muir put in such long hours at the facility, often sleeping in a spare bed in the medical wing, and now I had my answer. Muir and his work were indivisible. He had no partner, no children. The closest he’d come to kids was the team of young scientists he had culled from the best schools in the world – and guys like me and Lewis. We were, at least in part, creatures of his imagination, his creations.