The Boy Who Knew Too Much

by Jeffrey Westhoff

  Brian expected Eck to throw the gun at him. Instead Eck dropped it into the passenger-side foot well.

  “Stop the van,” Brian said. “The CIA is after you already. Silver called for backup when we arrived at the warehouse.”

  Eck returned his attention to the roadway. “Silver wouldn’t dare call the CIA,” he said to the windshield.

  So much for that bluff, Brian thought. “You’ll have to stop soon. How are you going to explain me and Silver to your buyer?”

  Eck’s head snapped around. The shock on his face told Brian he had guessed correctly about the buyer.

  “I’ll make you regret jumping through that door,” Eck said. The engine revved and the acceleration tugged Brian backward. Silver groaned, stirred, and went still again.

  Eck continued to accelerate into the next corner and took it hard. The tires shrieked, and Brian bounced against the wall. Silver rolled into Brian’s shins, knocking him off balance. Brian threw his hands out to break his fall and crashed into the Prometheus control panel. He grabbed at the joystick and used it to pull himself upright as Eck straightened out the van.

  Eck glanced back at him. “Don’t touch that!” he cried.

  Brian pushed a button next to the joystick. “Stop that!” Eck yelled, then got his eyes back to the road.

  “If you don’t want me to play with your precious machine,” Brian said as he flipped a switch, “come back here and stop me.”

  Brian’s fingers played over more buttons and switches, but nothing happened. The engine growled as Eck increased speed. The only way to force Eck to stop was to turn Prometheus on. Brian studied the panel. Just beneath the video screen he spied a button marked with a bisected circle, the universal symbol for power. Brian pressed the button. The circular symbol glowed green, and red LED pinpricks illuminated across the panel as Prometheus hummed to life.

  Eck looked back. “Turn it off!”

  “Make me,” Brian shouted. He pushed a series of buttons on an overhead panel and heard a loud whir and then a whoosh from above. The Prometheus gun was rising through the roof.

  Eck jerked the steering wheel back and forth. Brian flew toward the far wall, tripping over Silver. He landed alongside Silver, their faces close together. Silver moaned but didn’t move. As Brian sat up his hand brushed against Silver’s jacket and felt something hard and metallic. The Beretta Silver had taken from the warehouse guard! Brian tugged the gun from Silver’s pocket and stood.

  “Stop the van,” he said.

  Eck looked at Brian, then the Beretta, then back at Brian. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said. A bead of sweat rolled past his right eye.

  “At this point, I think I probably would,” Brian said. “Stop the van.”

  Eck turned back to the roadway. Brian looked past him through the windshield. He saw the fortress-like graves that were near the top of the hill and wondered how close they were to the upper gate and Eck’s buyer. The next curve was thirty feet ahead. Eck sped up.

  Without hesitating, Brian leveled the pistol and squeezed the trigger.

  CHAPTER 52--GATE

  Brian had prepared himself for the pistol’s kick, but not its bang. Within the Sprinter’s compact interior, the shot boomed like a thunderclap. A deep ringing in Brian’s eardrums replaced his sense of hearing. He watched Eck’s mouth form angry words, but they were lost to the dull tone inside his head.

  Brian turned from Eck and saw tiny sparks flicker inside the neat hole he had just shot through the video monitor. Brian marveled that it was a perfect circle, with only a few hairline cracks radiating outward. With one bullet he had rendered the Prometheus weapon unfit for sale. Would a second bullet damage it beyond repair?

  Before Brian could try, the entire control panel threw itself at him as Eck angled into the next corner. The impact spun Brian toward the rear door. He dropped the gun as he fell. It skipped across the floor and disappeared through the open door. Brian landed with his head and shoulders sticking out the doorway. The floor shifted as the van hit the straightaway, and Brian slid forward. He threw his hands out but failed to get hold of the doorframe. He slipped again and his torso was hanging in space. Inches below, the road surface rushed by like a deadly, raging river. Brian slipped once more. His center of gravity was nearly over the transom. He closed his eyes and cursed himself for taking off the helmet.

  Brian stopped sliding. Something had clutched his ankle. Brian twisted to see behind him. Silver looked back at him, his right hand holding Brian’s leg and his left arm wrapped around the control seat’s pedestal. Silver pulled Brian inside. Brian mouthed the word, “Thanks,” uncertain if he actually spoke it. Silver nodded and looked around the cabin, evidently assessing the situation he awoke to.

  To clear his ears, Brian worked his jaw as if he were chewing a large gumball. The ringing subsided. At the threshold of hearing, a monkey’s chattering transformed into Eck yammering “I’ll kill you!” over and over. But Eck’s hatred was directed at the road, not at Brian. Eck yelled, “Kralik, you son of a bitch!” Brian was confused. Why would Eck be cursing Kralik?

  Three crooked white stars appeared in the windshield in rapid succession—Pop! Pop! Pop!—and Brian knew they were gunshots smacking against bullet-proof glass. The van swerved and a brilliance of headlights washed through the windshield and blinded Brian. The Sprinter shook with a tremendous impact, and a din of crunching metal sounded behind the van.

  Silver placed his mouth to Brian’s ear and shouted, “Brace yourself!” He sprang toward the driver’s compartment reaching for the hand brake. Brian hugged the seat pedestal. Silver yanked the brake, and the van slewed right.

  Eck swung at Silver and landed a lucky blow across the bridge of his nose. Silver staggered back toward Brian, who stood and grasped Silver’s shoulders to steady him.

  The van was threatening to come apart. Tendrils of smoke poured through the bullet hole in the monitor. Sparks flew from the control panel, bringing a smell of burning ozone. The front tires squealed in torment as the van continued to skid, precipitously slowing but refusing to stop.

  Eck released the hand brake and the Sprinter slingshot forward. He spun the steering wheel to correct the skid but made it worse. The van lurched at an angle.

  “Time to go!” Silver yelled as he tackled Brian, propelling the two of them toward the rear door. The van tipped before they cleared the opening. Eck screamed in terror.

  In the brief moment they were airborne, Silver twisted so that Brian would land on top of him. Silver grunted like a wounded bear as they hit the pavement, and the pair tumbled forward with the van’s residual momentum.

  The Sprinter was on its side, the rear door bouncing and spraying yellow sparks as the van skidded across one of the rampart-like mausoleums. It sailed over the side. The van bounced twice when it hit the roadway below. The impact sent it spinning over the ledge of the next rampart. This time the van crashed nose first and rolled straight over onto its roof. It teetered for a moment on the next ledge, then dropped. The Prometheus gun was sheared from the roof as the Sprinter slid over the verge. The van slammed onto its side and spiraled slowly down the inclined path until it slithered into a gathering of mourning statues. An angel fell, one wing snapping off as it hit the ground. The van remained still except for a spinning front tire. Brian could see nothing through the fractured windshield.

  Silver groaned as he sat up. “You all right, Brian?”

  Brian held up a palm that was bloody from scraping the pavement. “I’m sore, but I think this is the worst of it. What about you?”

  “Left arm’s numb; hope it’s not broken.” Silver looked around. “Why are we in the cemetery?”

  “This is where Eck was meeting his buyers.” Brian pointed. “I think that was them.”

  Silver checked where Brian was pointing. The cemetery’s upper gate was at the next level, and the bodies of two men Brian had not seen before lay just inside. Brian stood for a better look. One man’s left temple and the other man’s
right were wet with blood. The men might have been seated in a car and fired upon through the side windows.

  Brian and Silver turned to find the car that had collided head-on with the van. They saw a mangled, dark gray BMW sedan a few hundred feet below. It rested on its side against one of the mausoleums and had nearly snapped in two. Kralik’s body was draped out the broken windshield. Brian could make out the hump of another lifeless form in the passenger seat. Voss or Carter? And was the remaining man’s corpse hidden in the wreckage?

  “Well,” Silver said, “you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce what happened here. Kralik and friends didn’t cut their losses and run, as I figured they would. Looks like they knew about this rendezvous and decided to double-cross Eck.” Silver indicated the bodies inside the gate. “They ambushed the buyers—bang, bang—and took their car and their money, maybe a cool five hundred million. And then they waited to kill Eck and steal the Prometheus van, worth another five hundred million.”

  Brian nodded. He had figured it out as well. He said, “I guess when they saw the van roaring up the hill with the Prometheus gun in firing position, they panicked and attacked Eck. Seems they didn’t know the Prometheus van was built like a tank.”

  Brian shrugged and said nothing more. He regarded the BMW and realized it was the cemetery’s newest tomb, containing a fresh consignment of death.

  Brian looked down at the van. Was it a tomb as well? The tire had stopped spinning. Smoke seeped from the cargo area. Brian waited for the driver’s door to open. It didn’t. He spotted a stone stairway leading to the cemetery’s lower half. Brian stood and walked toward it.

  “Brian, don’t bother,” Silver said. Brian ignored him.

  Brian could see through the windshield when he got to the van. Eck’s motionless, twisted form was sprawled across the passenger seat, his face pressed against the cracked glass of the door’s window. Brian looked into Eck’s eyes and remembered another pair of empty eyes he saw in a Lucerne alley five hundred miles away and several lifetimes ago.

  “I told you you couldn’t save yourself,” Brian said.

  He stepped to the side and knelt beside the toppled angel. He caressed its smooth, heavenly face. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he walked back up the hill.

  Silver was not where Brian had left him. He was leaning against the gate. As Brian approached, he saw Silver speaking into a cell phone. He had folded his left arm across his chest as if it were cradled in an invisible sling. He nodded to Brian and continued his conversation. From the businesslike tone to Silver’s voice, Brian guessed he was using his official CIA phone. Silver said, “We’re going to need a level one suppression team.”

  Brian pulled at the gate and discovered it was locked. The key most likely was inside the BMW, but Brian wasn’t about to search for it. He grasped two vertical iron bars and hauled himself up. The gate was about fifteen feet high. Brian climbed. Silver followed Brian with his eyes and continued to speak. “We’ve got five, maybe six, subjects at the scene, so you’d better get here before the locals.” Brian guessed subjects meant dead bodies. Locals obviously referred to the Barcelona police.

  He lifted a leg over the top of the gate and paused to survey the cemetery one final time. The garden of statues below would have been breathtaking under other circumstances, and this undoubtedly was a beautiful place. But it was a home to death, and Brian was sick of death. He needed to put a barrier between death and himself, even if only a few slim iron bars formed that barrier.

  Brian eased his body to the other side and lowered himself. Silver continued to watch him. Brian dropped the last three feet, and slumped against the gate. Silver said, “I’m not the only one at the scene.” He shot Brian a conspiratorial look. “You’d better wake up the Madrid station chief for this.”

  CHAPTER 53--DEMANDS

  The CIA chose to disavow Brian’s involvement. No one but Silver was permitted to speak with him, or even acknowledge his existence.

  Brian first sensed this upon the arrival of the “level one suppression team.” The team’s youngest member, who appeared to be fresh out of college, bandaged Brian’s hand without talking or making eye contact. The two other men never looked in Brian’s direction.

  Brian stood to the side while Silver conferred with the men at the cemetery gate, then Silver borrowed their car and drove Brian to a small hotel just off Las Ramblas. Even though it was nearly midnight, he had no trouble checking Brian in. Silver accompanied Brian to his room and did a quick security sweep.

  “It looks like you’ll be safe here,” Silver said. “I have to go back to the cemetery. You get some sleep. I’ll return in a few hours and we’ll discuss your immediate future.”

  “What’s to stop me from leaving?”

  “The hotel’s being watched.”

  “I bet I could spot the surveillance team.”

  “If you do they’ll lose their jobs, so please don’t try.” Silver smiled wanly and added, “No one wants to tell the unemployment office he was fired by the CIA.”

  Once Silver was gone, Brian stripped off his clothes and took the most welcome shower of his life. After that he walked into the bedroom wearing only the white robe he found hanging in the bathroom. Brian picked up the phone. As he expected, it was dead. Brian crawled into the bed and immediately fell asleep.

  A sharp knock at the door woke him. Brian looked at the clock on the nightstand in time to see the numbers switch from 6:01 to 6:02. He went to the door.

  “What’s the password?” he asked.

  “Don’t be cute,” Silver replied.

  Brian let him in. Silver’s left arm was in a sling. “Sprained, but not broken,” he said. Silver tossed Brian’s backpack at him. “The Barcelona police recovered this,” he said. He picked up a shopping bag and tossed that at Brian, too. “Fresh clothes. Figured you needed some.” Brian went into the bathroom and put on the clothes, a new pair of Levis and a red polo shirt. They fit perfectly.

  Silver was sitting at the room’s writing desk when Brian came out. He drummed his fingers on a leather portfolio. “The good news,” Silver said, “is they want to reunite you with your school group as soon as possible.”

  Brian sat on the bed. “Who are they?”

  “Best to leave it at they.” Silver said. “Your group is in Paris now. We should have you there early tomorrow if all goes well. They do want to debrief you, but decided to wait and do it in Milwaukee, at your convenience.”

  Brian shook his head and chuckled. “My convenience. Can we do it at the Safe House?”

  “You talking about that spy bar?”

  “Yeah.”

  Silver laughed. “Sure, set it up. They won’t appreciate the irony.”

  “You won’t be the one debriefing me?”

  “Oh no, after I drop you off in Paris I am not permitted to contact you in any way.”

  “Upon penalty of death?”

  “I’d rather not find out.” Silver tapped the portfolio. “Now the condition for this generous offer of personal freedom is that you swear never to tell anyone what has happened to you or what you have done since we left Lucerne.”

  “You mean since you kidnapped me?”

  “That won’t be the official case history.”

  Brian glared at him before saying, “All right, I won’t tell. No one would believe me anyway.”

  Brian had already considered this. Even worse than the people who didn’t believe him would be the reactions of those who did. His parents would be afraid to let him leave the house for years. And if Tim and others believed him, they would think Brian had lived out some kind of exciting action movie. They wouldn’t see it as an ordeal filled with desperation and death. As much as Brian hated to give the CIA what it wanted, he knew it would be best to keep his brief espionage career secret.

  “Then,” Silver opened the portfolio to reveal a document of many pages, “would you please sign this agreement?”

  Brian read through it, although the legal jargon
often confused him. He snickered when he found a paragraph that declared he would be surrendering all literary, film, and digital rights to his story. He looked up at Silver. “I like this clause where it says by signing this agreement I acknowledge it does not exist.”

  Silver offered a pen, but when Brian reached for it Silver tipped it back toward himself like the arm of a metronome. He said, “I am not acting in my employer’s best interest when I offer you the following advice. It would cause at the least considerable embarrassment to the Agency, and at the most a national scandal, if the public learned of your involvement in this operation. So if you were to make any demands before signing this document”—Silver riffled his fingers to indicate money—“the Agency would probably give in.”

  Brian mulled this over. After a few minutes, he said, “I have two demands.”

  “All right,” Silver said, “what’s your first demand?”

  “I presume Lenore Harte will receive a posthumous honor, but those two hikers in the Pyrenees—I think they were British—I want their families to get something. Invent an insurance policy for them. Would one hundred thousand dollars each be too much?”

  Silver rubbed a thumb beneath his lower lip. “We can work something out. What’s your second demand?”

  “I want to see Larissa.”

  CHAPTER 54--PARTING

  As it turned out, Larissa had made the same demand of her government.

  Three hours after Brian signed the agreement, Silver drove him to the French consulate. They were led to a small sitting room down the corridor from the public entrance. Their escort turned to Silver. “Monsieur Parker may go in, and you may wait here.” He pointed to a chair outside the door. Silver shot the man an ugly look and sat. Brian stepped into the room and heard the escort close the door behind him. A door on the opposite wall opened and Larissa appeared. Brian’s breath caught at the sight of her.

  She wore a cream-colored blouse and a dark blue knee-length skirt. A pair of leather navy blue loafers replaced her familiar Chuck Taylor All-Stars, and if Brian wasn’t mistaken she was wearing pantyhose. Her chestnut brown hair was tied in a cream ribbon that matched her blouse. Her face lit up and she bounded across the room to kiss Brian, slightly limping. She placed her head on his shoulder and hugged him tightly.