by Brad Meltzer
And then Karl cuts the parachute line and there’s nothing, just the cold air biting into her skin, 3,000 feet, 2,000 feet, and then Karl gets the reserve chute to deploy, and he’s screaming, Hazel-Ann, curl!
And she is arching into him, letting him wrap his body around hers as they plummet into the ground, his body breaking her fall. Hazel thinks he’s dead. She’s out here on Russia’s Ratmanov Island, looking for an old KGB agent who knew her father, with a dead man strapped to her back, thinking how will she ever get back, thinking this is the end, thinking she’s not doing this shit anymore. It doesn’t matter what her dad did. If her mother were alive right now, she’d be a different person; her dad and Skip wouldn’t recognize her. It’s time to start just being a professor, not some kind of self-destructive death-seeker. If she ever gets off this island, she’s going to get a tattoo, something that tells the story of bad decisions survived and a better life lived.
A permanent scar.
And then Karl is saying, “You need to learn to jump on your own,” except it’s hard to understand him because he’s bitten through his lip and blood is pouring from his mouth.
“All those years ago, as I looked to see what my dad had done, I was the one who found you. But today…was this for my father?” Hazel asks now. “Did you keep me alive for my father? Or for the government?”
“For you,” Karl says.
And then he is gone, just stops, no gasping for breath, no last lunge forward. It is just as if he is unplugged, which is how people die, Hazel knows, when their brain stops first, not the heart.
“Did you know him?” Hazel asks Ingrid.
“No,” Ingrid says, looking at his face now. His eyes are open, unlike Arthur Kennedy’s. Hazel suspects she is lying. Ingrid may not recognize him specifically, but she knows what he is. “I don’t know,” Ingrid adds. “I don’t know anymore.”
“Think,” Hazel says. “Somehow this man knew my father. I think he worked with him. I think—” And now Hazel is nodding, old memories flooding forward. Her father didn’t just work with this bear of a man. Her father saved him. As a child. The Bear was young then, one of the so-called “pages” of the bible, a sick child who Jack Nash came to rescue.
“When I went looking for other pages, he was one of the first I found,” Hazel adds, staring at The Bear. “He helped me look for others—to see how many orphans my dad’s actions created. I traveled around the world with that man. I was intimate with him, Ingrid. And now I just ripped his throat out. Still, that doesn’t explain—” She paused. “How did he know about Kennedy?” Hazel demands, though of course she knows the answer. The same way The Bear would’ve known about Darren Nixon and the threats of blackmail that Nixon made. The same way he would have been expecting her in Dubai when he dumped Kennedy’s body. The same way he would know she was here.
Skip.
Or it could be Louis Moten, a man she’s never met, but who’s apparently been behind the major actions of her family’s life since before she was even born.
“I’m just a crazy old woman,” Ingrid says. “I’ll probably be found wandering the streets tomorrow. And then they’ll take me right back to the hospital. And I will stay there, Hazel, until they send someone else to kill me.”
Hazel nods, knowing she’s right. The only way to bury the stories of the bible would be to bury all those involved with it. For decades, her father’s work was kept secret, but now it was all coming out. Whoever hired The Bear, that’s why he was here today. To kill Ingrid. To protect Hazel. And to keep the most damaging secrets of all: family secrets.
“Wash the blood off yourself, and then go,” Ingrid says. She thinks for a moment. “Take the Volga, leave it at the airport. I’ll retrieve it tonight and dispose of it.”
“What are you going to do with the body?”
“I will hide it, and then I will burn down the entire block, like we should have done in the first place, two hundred years ago.”
91
The Bear hibernates.
“She’s gone,” Ingrid says, once the Volga has pulled out of the shop and she’s closed the garage door, rolled another cigarette for herself.
The Bear sits up.
Feels his neck.
It’s a bad wound. But it’s not the kind of wound that kills a man. Ingrid knows that. Hazel would too if her memories were back. But no, Hazel’s not who she was. Not yet.
The duct tape has done a nice job. An excellent Band-Aid. He’ll need to stitch himself, quickly. He’ll do that next, after he takes care of the Ingrid problem. Not that she’ll be a problem, he can see, as she pulls a nearby chair, sits down, rubs at her face. The things she has seen. The Bear wonders how she has lived so long. It explains why she’s ready for this to end.
There will be a scar. He won’t be able to be around people for a while. Which is fine. He prefers the absence of people. And besides, to Hazel, he is already dead.
The Bear opens his backpack, removes the hypodermic. Sets it on the ground, a foot from Ingrid. The woman doesn’t move.
“Will it hurt?” Ingrid asks.
“No,” The Bear says. “Your heart will just stop. But complications happen, as I think you know.”
“I should hurt,” Ingrid says. “I deserve to hurt.”
“I can arrange that for you.” He takes a knife from his backpack, sets it between them. It’s long and serrated.
Ingrid takes one last puff of her cigarette, then extinguishes it on the palm of her hand, not even wincing. “How would you advise me to do it?”
“Through your stomach,” The Bear says. “You won’t be able to make it through your breastbone to your heart. If you go for your throat, the pain will be too intense for you to continue. This will be painful, but by the time you feel it, it will be over.”
“Why have you waited so long to come for me?”
“I needed Hazel to see what she has seen,” he says. “I’m sorry it has to be in this place. If you had been home, I would have murdered you there.”
“Why now?”
“For what you did. You didn’t even tell Hazel, did you?” The Bear asks.
Ingrid stares down at the ash in her hand. “Who told you?”
“It didn’t take much. Simple math, really. This puzzle you and Jack built all these years ago, so many of the pieces were tucked away, forever hidden. Even with the best resources, no one could ever prove anything. But then Arthur Kennedy comes looking, and in only a few weeks, this modest man—who lives so close nearby—suddenly puts all of it together. Such good fortune, don’t you think? A minor miracle, really. That is, unless he had some help.”
Ingrid shook her head.
“Please don’t insult me by denying it,” The Bear says. “Kennedy came to see you, didn’t he? He came to see you, and you filled him in, pointing him in the right places.”
Ingrid still didn’t answer.
“What makes no sense to me is: Why? After all these years of silence, why open your mouth?”
Ingrid looks up, looks The Bear straight in the eyes. “We need to answer for what we did.”
Now The Bear was the one shaking his head. “You have regrets now, don’t you?” he asks.
“Could you let me go? Would anyone even know?”
“I would know,” he says. “And then eventually, they would come for me.”
“Moten wouldn’t have the guts.”
“Who?” The Bear asks.
A smile crawls across Ingrid’s face. For once, The Bear is confused.
“Agent Moten? Louis Moten? You aren’t working for him?”
“No,” The Bear says.
“Then who?” Ingrid asks. “Who sent you to do all this, to come after me?”
“I told you, I pay a debt. To interested parties,” he says, though he knows now exactly who that party is, that has been made clear, “who would prefer their arrangements remain quiet.”
“People like yourself?”
“Like myself, yes.”
“Ar
e your parents still alive?” Ingrid asks.
“In a way,” he says. His father is driving a taxi now in Bugojno, with a new face, a new name. His mother is long dead, he hopes. Yugoslavia is long gone. Another war to replace it, make it worse. He has not been back to the Balkans. His father would not leave, and anyway, he’d spent half his life tasked with the business of watching, waiting, taking care of these problems with Benedict Arnold’s bible.
Some of the so-called “pages”—the ones who lived here—were recruited by the government, not even knowing why they’d been embraced and promoted. The best kind of sleeper agents were the ones who had no idea they were sleepers, with familial and foreign ties that could one day be exploited. Other pages—the older ones, especially the teenagers, like The Bear when he was rescued—made their own deals, trading favors for a prosperous American life. All these secrets needed to be kept.
Still, every few years, usually when someone died, a few details would leak out. Children would begin to search; parents would make deathbed confessions. That’s how Kennedy knew to start digging into his own past; someone sent him an old letter from his father. Whenever it happened, the leaks had to be stopped. This was The Bear’s job. This was the price of The Bear’s life, the deal he made as one of the first “pages.” Another favor given. Another leak plugged.
“When you were younger, what was your affliction?” Ingrid asks.
“Brain tumor,” The Bear says. “Benign, it turns out. But I would be dead nevertheless. So I am told.”
“What did we get in return?”
“I wasn’t privy to that information,” The Bear says, “as I was fourteen and dying.”
“Insignificant now, I suppose,” Ingrid says. “Though know: What we were back then, we aren’t like that anymore.”
“Nevertheless,” The Bear says, “there will always be someone who wants to keep these secrets.” He shrugs. “My check has cleared. I do this job. I stay quiet. It is through.”
“They could never get you.”
“Not now, no,” he says. “But one day, I will be your age, and it will be easier. As you can see.”
“I made you,” Ingrid says. “Twenty years ago, we’d be on different sides of this.”
“Twenty years ago,” The Bear says, “I would have tortured you for a week before I let you die. Appreciate that I have evolved.” He pushes the knife toward her. “Insert it at your belly button and then pull up toward your sternum, if you can.”
She stares at the knife for a long time, not picking it up. “When Hazel found you all those years ago, when she went looking for the other children we had ‘saved,’ that wasn’t just good fortune, was it? You found her, didn’t you?”
For once, The Bear doesn’t answer.
“Back then, if you wanted to keep this all quiet, you should’ve killed her,” Ingrid says.
“I almost did.”
“But you fell in love with her. Those months you spent together, she thought you were helping her find Jack’s secrets. But instead, you were pretending, weren’t you? All that time you spent together, traveling the world, you were keeping her off track, trying to keep her from uncovering her dad’s sins, from finding all the ‘pages’ in the bible, including your own page.”
“She knew who I was. She knew who her dad was too, though she couldn’t prove it back then. It was a hunch for her. A mystery. She said she wanted to help those other children—the other ‘pages’—find the truth about their lives. The anthropologist in her saw the one thing we all have in common. That all parents lie to their children.”
“All lovers lie to each other too,” Ingrid says. “So in that time together, even as you kept her from finding everything we had done, you longed for her.”
Again, The Bear doesn’t reply.
“I loved him, you know,” she adds. “Jack.”
“Then you will see him again.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I believe that you do,” he says. “If you can, do it now. While you have that good thought in your mind. It will ease your passage.”
“I can,” she says, and takes the knife, gives one deep breath, and then does the job, as she’s been trained to do.
It takes Ingrid five minutes to bleed to death from the wound, her eyes open the entire time, but she doesn’t say another word, doesn’t make another noise.
Before he leaves, The Bear—who thinks he might start calling himself Karl again—drops a single chewed straw on the ground next to Ingrid’s body, as he was directed.
A sprinkling of Skip Nash’s hair, one of his fingernails. It will be more than enough, combined with the straw he left at Ingrid’s.
The Bear ponders whether he should kill Ingrid’s neighbors.
He puts his hood up, pushes through the back door of the warehouse, inhales, and catches a hint of the Atlantic on the breeze. He thinks maybe he’ll find a boat, sail the old spice routes. He relaxes for just a single second, realizes that the next portion of his life is in front of him, and it could be a fine life. He would be rich soon enough, yes, his life could be rich from here on out.
He still won’t let the neighbors live.
92
Hazel leaves the Volga idling at the valet station of her hotel, telling the kid who’s dressed like a carriage driver to keep it running, that she’ll be right back down, that she has a flight to catch and the car is unpredictable, which it is, having stalled on her twice on her way back from Kennedy’s warehouse.
She’s also worried about her bloody shoes in the backseat. If the valet sees them and there are problems, she doesn’t trust this werewolf, isn’t sure when it will show up. She has already killed a bear today.
She sprints barefoot through the hotel lobby, up the stairs and down the hall to her room, where she slides her card key into the lock. It lights up green, and she’s in.
The door closes behind her, and she allows herself to breathe, to think, to figure out what her next move is.
Fly to Dubai.
Find Skip.
Tell him it’ll be okay, even if it won’t.
Tell him she would have done the same thing.
Tell him that she has killed people she doesn’t even remember killing.
Tell him that some people deserve to die. Some deaths are good. That you honor the people who love you by protecting them, that if she learned anything looking for Benedict Arnold’s bible, it’s that, in the end, even her father’s treason was to help someone.
Let him sort things out with Agent Rabkin. Maybe there’s a way to pretend everything is make-believe again. Maybe Skip promises to stay quiet, promises to keep the government’s secret, promises never to go on TV again, never, never, never.
Except, no, Hazel suddenly sees she’s in the wrong room, that an error has been made, because there’s a woman in her bed: bald, blankets pulled to her neck, oxygen running into her nose, a portable tank next to the bed, eyes closed, skin so pallid it’s practically translucent. Hazel thinks that somehow her mother has come back, that she didn’t really die, that she’s been moved here all along, waiting for Hazel to save her life.
“I’m sorry,” Hazel says, starts to back out, not even really thinking now, not even really aware, because who is she talking to?
No, this must be the wrong room, except there’s her suitcase in the corner. Stacks of her papers are on the desk—the family trees, the episodes, her random thoughts whittled into her own shorthand.
There is also a bag, with the logo of the Al Qasr hotel on it, sitting on the dresser. A bottle of rum. A bottle of gin. A bucket of ice. A pair of men’s loafers.
Hazel looks to her right, sees that the connector to the room next door is open, and standing in the entry is a man, late sixties, in a wrinkled linen suit. A TV plays in the other room.
“Have a seat, Hazel,” the man says, points her to the sofa in the corner. “Have a drink with me.” He has a subtle twang in his voice, as if he’s been slowly cured of being Texan. He also has
a gun in his hand—a nine—silencer on the barrel, held gently, not like he’s prepared to use it, just like he wants Hazel to take notice of it, though the silencer makes Hazel think that’s not exactly right.
“Who are you?” Hazel says.
“Come on, now,” Louis Moten says. “You know who I am.”
93
If you were going to shoot me,” Hazel says, “you should go ahead and do it.”
Moten regards the gun in his hand like he’s surprised it’s there. “Didn’t know who was coming through the door,” Moten says, “you or your brother.”
“My brother is off looking for Benedict Arnold’s bible.”
“I think we can be honest with each other,” Moten says. “He’s found it.” He goes over to the dresser, pours two inches of rum in a glass, sets it on the coffee table in front of Hazel, pours three inches for himself.
“I don’t drink,” Hazel says.
“Yes you do,” Moten says. “You drink, you smoke, you hunt and track people who might know what your dad was up to. Maybe even kill one if they threaten to come after your father. Every now and then, you dust off some relic and talk smart about it. Even now. You’re the werewolf, aren’t you?”
He downs his glass. When Hazel doesn’t pick hers up, he says, “Suit yourself,” and swallows that one too. The reek of alcohol off Moten is palpable, but he doesn’t seem drunk.
“I know what my brother did in Libya,” Hazel says. “I know what Arthur Kennedy found, and what he brought to Darren Nixon. I know they were blackmailing my dad and Skip—and I know everything Ingrid Ludlow knows. So don’t threaten me.”