by Ted Dekker
I look like Jude Law and I’m . . . He didn’t bother finishing the thought because he drew a blank.
It didn’t matter; he was close to the target now. He would kill the doctor as Kalman had ordered, and then, with any luck at all, the true game—the one he’d waited so patiently for—would begin.
He’d been watching Johnny’s progress since he and the woman, whom he hated only slightly less than Johnny, set foot in New York. They’d gone off the reservation last night, leaving the hotel room spotless. Even so, Englishman knew their ultimate destination and in fact had anticipated that Johnny would do what he was now doing.
Englishman knew not only where they were heading but how they would get there, based on the last few tracking signals emitted by the implant before it had stopped transmitting.
He exited the freeway, backtracked a mile on the frontage road, cut west for half a mile, and pulled into a long gravel driveway. Horses grazed in a fenced green pasture on his right. He’d killed a horse once. The experience had left him cold. They were dumb animals. Household pets offered only slightly more fascination.
Dr. Henry Humphries was a veterinarian. Englishman had never needed his veterinary services, but the good doctor had once sewn part of the Ukrainian’s finger back on.
“I am not Englishman today,” he said, parking by the large barn.
“Today I am simply . . .” He considered several choices. “Unman. I’m Unman.”
He put the Buick in park, interlaced his fingers, and cracked his knuckles loudly. This was a cliché, of course. But he loved cliché because it had become so vogue to hate cliché. In truth, those who cringed at the use of cliché were their own cliché.
He stepped from the car and scanned the barn. His favorite movie was Kill Bill. Despite his general hatred of women, he liked Black Mamba because she fought like a man. And she wore yellow leather, which appealed to him for no reason that he could understand, no matter how much he thought about it.
Unman. Unman walked up to the door and wiped his black canvas shoes on a mat that read “All Animals Welcome, Whites Use Front Entrance.”
For a moment Unman wished he was black. Maybe he was. He tried the door, turned the knob, and walked in without announcing himself.
Fireweed Mexican tile floor. White walls in need of a fresh coat. Clean at first glance but dirty under the skin, like most people. The place smelled of manure.
Manure and Johnny.
A man in a brown tweed jacket stood to the right of a workbench that held a large metal tub, something you might wash an animal in. Behind him, a dozen stalls housed a couple of horses, some pigs, and a lamb of all things. A fluffy white lamb.
The lamb bleated.
“May I help you?”
Unman took his eyes off the sheep and faced the man. White, fat, and old. Not fat-fat, but a good fifty pounds of blubber on his gut. Unman imagined the man without a shirt because he had both the time and the imagination to do so. Evidently sewing up animals didn’t burn the calories as much as, say, kickboxing or jumping on a trampoline, either one of which would do the doctor good.
The man wore gray polyester pants and an untucked yellow shirt. He held a syringe in his right hand. If he was expecting any female company, he wasn’t concerned with impressing them. Maybe Unman liked this doctor.
“What’s your name?” Unman asked.
“I’m sorry, was I expecting you?” The man showed only slight fear. He filled the syringe from a vial and laid both on the table.
“I’m Unman. I’m looking for a man and a woman who stopped here last night. Good-looking fellow, about so tall, and a hot woman who tends to boss him around. The man had a small device buried in his skull that evidently didn’t go off as it was designed to. We think someone here took it out, thereby sealing his own fate. So I guess I’m not really looking for the man who’s all that, or the woman who bosses him around, but the doctor who helped them escape. Need to clean things up, if you know what I mean.”
Surprisingly, the man still showed minimal fear. Interesting. Maybe Unman should drop the clever-meant-to-be-terrifying cliché and be more sinister. But that failed to interest him, so he continued.
“If you are that doctor, I’ll need the implant. Then I’ll have to kill you so that you don’t tell anyone else about it. If you’re not the doctor I’m looking for, then I’ll have to kill you for knowing that I’m looking for a doctor to kill. So who are you, the doctor who needs killing, or the innocent bystander who needs killing?”
Now more fear showed on the man’s face. Clichés and all.
“They were here,” the doctor said.
“And the implant?”
The man produced a small box from under the bench in front of him and held it out.
Unman walked forward. He knew what would happen now. Any man who showed only a little fear when presented with the prospect of his own death had a plan. The doctor obviously thought he could survive this meeting.
The clichés weren’t working as well as Unman had hoped. He wanted to get this over with and make the call.
He stopped twenty feet from the man. “Throw it here,” he said.
The doctor made as if to throw the device with his left hand, but Unman didn’t care about the implant. Syringe man was right-handed, and his right hand was under the bench top, holding something—probably a gun—that filled the doctor with confidence.
Unman could have waited for the man’s hopeless attempt to distract him by throwing the implant.
He could have waited for the man’s gun to clear the counter.
He could have even waited for the gun to go off. All of these would have been consistent with a tough villain defying death with elegance. Cliché.
But the time for cliché was gone, so Unman pulled a gun from his right hip and shot the doctor through his nose.
The man dropped like an elevator car, smacked the bottom of his jaw on the bench, bounced back with a few shattered teeth to go with his broken nose, and fell heavily to the ground.
In all likelihood, the doctor hadn’t even seen Unman draw.
He walked to the window and pulled out his cell phone. Dialed the number. Two of the horses were looking at the barn, alerted by the gunshot. He wondered who would take care of the doctor’s horses now.
“Yes?”
“The doctor is dead. I have the implant.”
He could hear Kalman’s breathing in the silence.
“Kill Saint first,” Kalman said. “Then complete the contract.”
“Thank you.” Unman closed the phone.
Englishman hated Kalman, but he hated Johnny more. In fact, he’d been born to hate Johnny. Kalman didn’t know this, Agotha didn’t know, but Englishman knew. And now he was finally in a position to do something about that hate.
“Game on, Johnny,” he said. Was that cliché?
26
Paradise was nestled in the Colorado mountains off the beaten path, several miles from the main road that passed through Delta.
The trees in Colorado were different from any Carl had ever seen. Tall evergreens that pointed to the sky mixed with deciduous trees similar to the ones that surrounded the compound in Hungary. The terrain was severe and sharp, with cliffs and huge outcroppings of rocks.
The Rocky Mountains. Carl watched from the car with fascination. It was familiar to him only because the boy had suggested it should be. Or did he remember?
They’d flown into Denver as Elmer and Jane Austring, knowing full well that Kalman could trace the false identities he himself had provided. But it would take even someone as powerful as Kalman at least a day to track them down. By then, they’d be gone. As soon as they’d visited Paradise, they would assume new identities and move on.
A taxi had taken them from Denver International Airport to a used car dealer off Interstate 70, where Kelly had paid $8,000 for the old blue Ford truck she now drove. They’d exchanged license plates with another vehicle in Vail, and then with yet another in Grand Junction. None of this wo
uld prevent Kalman from tracking them, but it would hold off the authorities in the event that Carl had been fingered as a suspect in the president’s shooting.
News of the assassination attempt was everywhere. Shouting from all of the newspapers in the airport, all of the television monitors in the waiting areas, every station on the radio.
Carl was amazed by the reach of his one bullet. No one knew what to do with the information that the assassin’s bullet had caused so little damage. The White House had released no specifics—a good thing, Kelly said. Any trained ballistics expert would know that the shot had been impossible. Better that the public didn’t know.
“Why?” he’d asked.
She just shrugged her shoulders. “It’s our secret.”
He nodded. “Paradise, three miles,” he said, reading a sign ahead on their right.
She took the turnoff and angled the truck up a narrow paved road. Within half a mile they were driving down a winding strip of black-top. The edge fell sharply on the right into a deep valley. A metal guardrail provided a measure of security.
This was the road to Paradise. It could have been the road to Mexico as far as Carl knew. None of it was more familiar than a suggestion.
“I like the mountains,” Kelly said.
“They’re nice,” Carl said.
“Wait until you see the desert.”
They both knew that if the boy had been right and Paradise was Carl’s home, Kalman would know as well. Regardless of what happened here, they had to be gone by the end of the day.
They would go to the desert in Nevada.
Kelly glanced at him. “Do you recognize anything?”
“No.”
“Maybe when you see the town.”
“Maybe.”
The road descended, took a sharp turn, and fed into a valley. One moment they were watching trees rush by; the next they were looking down at a town.
Carl wasn’t sure if it was Paradise at first. Then they passed a sign that said it was. Welcome to Paradise, Colorado, Population 450.
He began to sweat.
“This is it,” Kelly said. “Do you recognize anything?”
A large building with a five-foot sign that read “Paradise Community Center” loomed ahead on the right. Beyond it, a grocery store with gas pumps out front. Houses on the left, running up to a tall church with a pointed steeple.
“Can you pull over?”
“Here?”
“Yes, pull over.”
He didn’t recognize anything, but his heart was hammering and he thought that might be a good sign.
Kelly pulled the pickup truck onto a dusty shoulder a hundred feet from the community center. “Do you recognize it?”
Carl stared ahead, searching his memory. This building had once been something else. A burned-down pile of rubble. Or a theater. Or maybe his mind was just making things up.
“Carl?”
“I . . . I don’t know.” He climbed out and faced the town. Something had happened here, he could sense it if not remember it. His body was reacting even if his mind wasn’t. Kelly joined him, exchanging looks between him and the town.
“Why can’t I remember?” he asked.
“Agotha’s no amateur. Only the strongest minds can endure her methods. She told me she’d never seen a mind as strong as yours. She was determined to either break you or kill you.”
She looked up at the cliffs to their right. “She broke you,” she said softly. “She tore your identity down until it was nothing, and then she rebuilt it, many times over. Your mind is still strong, stronger than before, but now its walls are built around the wrong identity.”
“Then it’ll have to be broken again,” Carl said.
She didn’t answer.
“I don’t know if I want to be broken again.”
“I understand. But if you reclaim your true identity, you’ll have fewer scars. You have a strong mind, Carl. A very, very strong mind.”
Carl started forward along the road’s dusty shoulder. Kelly followed. He spread his hands, palms facedown by his sides. A slight breeze passed through his fingers. He could smell the dust rising from his feet. The hot afternoon sun cut through the cool mountain air. He felt as if he was walking into a dream on legs of soggy cardboard and a body cut from paper.
The street was deserted. A bench . . .
Carl stopped and stared at the empty bench on a boardwalk in front of a rustic building called Smither’s Barbecue.
“What is it?”
“Does that bench look familiar to you?”
She stopped beside him. “I’ve never been here—why would it?”
His breathing thickened. For a moment he thought he might start to shake and sweat like he had in the hotel room. A tingle lit through his fingertips.
He stepped out onto pavement and angled for the middle of the road. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to walk down this road—maybe it gave him a better view—but he picked up his pace and crossed to the yellow dotted lines that split the blacktop in two.
The tingle spread from his fingertips into his bones. He pushed his feet over the dashes, striding with purpose. But in his mind it was all happening in slow motion. He was staring at the bench and marching into a mesmerizing dream without the slightest idea of where it would take him.
But he’d been here before.
“Carl?”
He veered to his right and angled for the bench. He fought an urge to run up to the bench and tear it from the ground.
His breathing came hard, pulling at air that refused to fill his lungs.
Something was wrong with the bench. He hated this bench. This bench was—
“Carl!”
He stopped.
“What’s wrong?”
It was just a wooden bench. Sitting on the boardwalk, ten feet away now. He looked up at the restaurant behind the bench. Smither’s Barbecue. Beside it the grocery store with the gas pumps. All Right Convenience. The large building behind and to his right. Paradise Community Center.
Carl slowly turned and studied the rest of the town. A dozen small businesses on the right side of the street. A hair salon, a flower shop, an automotive shop . . . others. Houses.
Houses were on the opposite side. A large lawn ran up to the church.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been here,” he said.
“Why were you running for the bench?”
“I don’t know. Why was I shaking in the hotel room? Why did I believe that you were my wife? Why did I climb into a crate full of hornets? Why did I put myself in an electric chair to die?”
Kelly shifted her eyes. He’d hurt her feelings.
“I’m not complaining,” he said. “I just don’t know anything any-more. I used to know who I was. Now I don’t. I wish we’d never gone to New York.”
“Johnny?” A voice was calling his name.
Kelly’s eyes darted over his shoulder. He turned and faced a medium-built man with dark hair who stood in the restaurant’s open doorway. The man’s eyes widened with a smile.
“Johnny Drake. Well I’ll be . . .” He twisted his head and yelled through the door. “Paula, get yourself out here and see who’s come back.”
The man marched down the steps and across the boardwalk and was nearly upon him before it occurred to Carl that showing his ignorance would raise unwanted questions. He smiled.
“Give me a hug, boy!” The man took Carl’s hand and wrapped his arm around his back, pulling him close. “Good to see you, Johnny.” The man slapped his back.
Carl didn’t know what to say.
“And who’s your friend?”
“This is Kelly.”
The man extended his hand. “Hello, Kelly. I’m Steve. Welcome to Paradise. Pun intended, always intended, although I can guarantee we don’t always live up to the name.”
A woman in a blue dress ran down the steps toward him. “Johnny? Johnny Drake, my goodness! We heard you were missing!”
Carl assumed she was the w
oman Steve called Paula. Their excitement in seeing him was infectious. He felt his face flush with an odd mixture of embarrassment and comfort.
They liked him.
Paula gave him a hug and kissed his cheek. “Are you okay?”
She smelled like a flower—a familiar and warming scent. He must find out what perfume she was wearing.
“Johnny?”
“Yes?”
“Are . . . Are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m fine. Just a little . . .”
“He’s on pain medication,” Kelly said, offering her hand. “Nothing serious. I’m Kelly.”
“Hello, Kelly. You’re . . .” Paula glanced between them. “You’re not . . .”
“No, no.” Kelly laughed. “Just good friends.”
“Well, I must say, Johnny, you know how to pick beautiful friends.”
“Thank you,” Kelly said.
Steve patted him on the back again. “Well then, come in and have a drink. On the house, of course. It’s not every day we get a hero coming home.”
“Actually . . .” Kelly caught Carl’s eyes.
“Actually, I would like to go home,” Carl said.
“Of course you would,” Paula said. “Does Sally know you’re here?”
“Sally? No. Has she moved?”
“From town? Goodness, no. She really doesn’t know? She’s going to faint! You go on. Don’t let us keep you. How long will you be in town?”
“Just a day,” Kelly said.
“Only a day? Then promise me you’ll stop by and fill us in. The others’ll be thrilled to see you. Does anyone else know?”
“No.”
“Most of them are at the fair in Delta, but they’ll be back by night. We’ll do something. Right, Steve? We could have a barbecue.”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay.”
“Perfect. I haven’t seen Sally today, but that doesn’t mean much. We don’t see her much these days. She’s kept to herself lately. She might have gone to Delta, but she might be home. You go on, don’t mind us.”
“Okay.”
Steve and Paula, presumably the proprietors of Smither’s Barbecue, stared at Carl, clearly expecting him to go home.
“What perfume are you wearing?” Carl asked.