by Andrew Pyper
Lily holds the rifle as still as she can but the barrel moves in a wavering circle no matter how hard she tries to correct it. Her focus shifts between this, her mother’s words, the sculpture made of tied-together sticks standing forty yards off among the trees.
More than any of this, it’s the feel of her mother next to her that runs through the moment. Her body fused with hers, her strong frame holding her straight like a kind of exoskeleton. Lily has been instructed to feel at one with the gun but she’s gone further than that. She is at one with her mother, the Remington, the forest, the earth beneath their knees.
But not the man made of sticks.
That’s what it is, not a sculpture at all but a human shape her mother had fashioned out of branches for arms and legs, a square of bark for its chest and mushroom cap for its face. A target.
“I’m ready,” Lily says.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Then do it.”
She instantly regrets it, hates herself for it, but she does what her mother told her not to. She hesitates.
“Do it! Now, Lily. Now!”
29
* * *
The crack of the gun wakes her from the dream, but it still takes a while for Lily to open her eyes and keep them that way.
A porthole. A glass of white wine. A pair of legs she believes are hers but wearing pants and shoes she doesn’t recognize.
“Good morning.”
A voice she knows and holds on to, using it like a life preserver that keeps her head above water.
“Where am I?”
Will checks his watch. “Right now? Germany, I would guess.”
The porthole is a window that looks out over a layer of clouds thousands of feet below. The legs are hers, but someone has taken off her clothes and dressed her in new ones. Will holds out a glass of apple juice.
“Drink this,” he says. “You need the sugar.”
The smell of the juice awakens her thirst. When she’s finished she puts the glass down on the table between herself and Will but her numbed fingers knock it over as they retreat.
“It’ll take an hour or two to get your motor skills back,” he says, righting the glass. “You want something more to drink? Some food? Believe it or not, I’ve got some pretty good—”
“We’re on a plane,” she says.
“That’s right.”
“Where is he?”
“With us.”
Lily spins around in her seat and the sudden movement brings black dots swimming before her.
“Easy,” Will says, leaning forward to help sit her up straight.
“Is he alive?”
“Yes.”
“Asleep?”
“He should be, given how much etorphine we’ve put in him the last twenty-four hours. He’s restrained.”
“Restrained,” Lily repeats.
He puts his hands on the table in a gesture of full disclosure. “Listen, Lily. I’m sorry for what—”
“Fuck you.”
“Let me explain.”
“You lied to me. About taking him down on Hampstead Heath, about me being safe. And you’re not CIA.”
“Would it make any difference if I told you I used to be?”
“Who do you work for?”
“They don’t have a name. I’m not sure who funds us specifically, but it’s people who’ve got limitless cash, give or take a billion. We’re not government, that’s all I’m sure about.”
“And these people—they aren’t going to use him to save lives.”
“No.”
“His blood being a cure-all. That was bullshit?”
“Total.”
“So why then? Why spend all this money on a private army just for him?”
Will glances down at his hands and then back at her. A flash of vulnerability she reads as the real thing.
“They told me it was to kill him,” he says.
“But he’s still alive.”
“We’re moving him to another location. He’ll be neutralized there.”
“Neutralized meaning euthanized?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look so certain about that.”
Will starts to get up. “I’ll get you something to eat. You must—”
“Questions first. My questions.”
He abandons the weak smile he’s been trying to hold since handing her the juice. “Okay,” he says, and sits.
“Where are we going?”
“Romania.”
“Where precisely?”
“It’s probably better if I don’t give a specific location.”
“Better for you or better for me?”
“Both.”
“Why Romania?”
“Money goes further in some places. And you need a lot of money to maintain the kind of privacy we require.”
Lily tries to arrange the details circling in her head into a narrative, but some piece slips away just when she’s almost got it straight.
Stick to the questions. You’re good at those. You’ll figure out what the answers mean later.
“Why tell me that story about his blood?” she asks.
“We needed your trust. The idea of him being able to save millions of lives seemed more appealing than assisting a conspiracy to kill him.”
“So all that crap about—”
“I don’t expect you to believe me, but that’s the truth. Along with your protection being my first priority.”
“How’s that?”
“I was trained to die making sure people in your position are kept safe.” He rubs his eyes. “Listen. You’d be dead already if it wasn’t for me.”
“Michael had plenty of opportunity to hurt me and he didn’t.”
“I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about us,” he says, and Lily remembers Black Parka running after her in Budapest and the Goodge Street platform. “There were members of our team who wanted to take you much earlier, learn what we could, then bury you. I made a case otherwise.”
“What do you know about me?”
“You?” he says, as if surprised to have his attention turned to the person in front of him. “I’d say everything except, in my experience, there’s always something that people hold on to, no matter how thick the file is.”
That’s your experience too. Isn’t it, Doctor?
“Why is it important that you appear nice to me?”
“It isn’t.”
Lily resists accepting this, but she does. Despite the blatant lies that have brought her here, she looks at Will’s scarred face and even now sees an honest man.
“Go back to the subway,” she says.
“It was our plan from the beginning to take him on the Underground,” he says.
“Why?”
“To put things on our terms.”
“You couldn’t have let me in on it?” she says.
“He has a connection to you. You’ve said so yourself.”
“How did you know he’d be on the train?”
“There was a strong probability he would be trailing you from the hotel. And underground we could control the environment—the entries and exits, hacking the computer to stop the train, the lights, the locks.”
“Whose call was it?”
“Mine.”
“That include murdering two policemen?”
“I wish that didn’t have to happen. But I believe in the upside of what we’re doing here. Sometimes casualties are part of the collateral damage.”
Lily hears this last phrase and recognizes that Michael used the exact same one to describe the lives he’d taken to sustain his own.
“You’re the boss of this crew, then,” she says. “Must keep you busy. Hunting a monster and playing the white knight with—what would you call me? An asset?”
“It’s not like that,” he starts. “You have to—”
“How did you shut down the train?” she interrupts him again. “Get us out of the city and onto
a private jet? Who can deliver you all that?”
“I already told you. The people I work for have considerable resources.”
“And they’ve chosen to spend them on killing one man.”
“Yes.”
“Then why is he still alive?”
Will pauses at this and she immediately knows he’s asked himself the same thing. His hesitation reveals a doubt he didn’t have before.
“I have orders to deliver him to them first,” he says finally.
“So they can do what? Let him talk to a chaplain? Order his last meal before strapping him in the chair?”
“I think there’s some of them who’d like to see the quarry they’ve spent so much on capturing.”
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense. There must be another reason.”
“Maybe. But they sign the checks.”
One of Will’s men walks past to step into the lavatory at the front of the plane. Lily recognizes him. The handsome man drinking outside the pub near the Montague Hotel, the one who called out to her. One on me, luv! Before he closes the door he looks back at her and winks.
“Why am I here?” she asks.
Will rubs at the stubble along his jawline.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “But you can appreciate the importance of confidentiality in an operation like this.”
“You can’t keep me. People back home will know I’m missing.”
“No, they won’t. You know that better than anyone. You left your life behind. And now you’re gone.”
“Who are you?” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Who. Are. You. It’s pretty simple. I’d like to know why the person who’s kidnapped me is doing what he’s doing.”
The lavatory door opens and the man from the pub comes out. Will waits for him to pass before speaking in a lowered voice.
“I’ve been trained in many skills, but none more important than not existing.”
“But you do. You’re right here.”
“I’m here,” he says, as if he needs to talk himself into it.
Lily is trying to think of another way to get him to open up when there’s the sound of growling from somewhere behind her. She gets up and stands in the aisle, looking for him.
They’ve put him in a chair at the very back of the plane. It’s one designed specifically for him: thick leather straps around his ankles, legs, waist, chest, even his neck. He still wears his hood so Lily can’t see his face, but she can imagine it. It’s the sound he’s making. A low roar vibrating through the floor.
Whatever the hell that is, it’s not Michael, she tells herself. His body. But not him.
A man and woman Lily hasn’t seen before stand near him, one on each side. The woman holds a syringe, the man a gun.
“When you die . . . I’ll be waiting . . .”
A voice like grinding stone comes from inside the hood. A shuddering bass that hits Lily square in the chest.
The woman plunges the needle in. Lily expects Michael to roar again, but he does something worse. He laughs. A sound that is nothing like him.
And it’s not one voice but the laughter of dozens, women and men and children. A noise that grows louder until the tranquilizer takes effect and the voices disappear, one by one, until there’s just one left: a girl’s. And she’s not laughing now, but crying.
Lily’s heard it before. She tries to remember who it belongs to and realizes it’s her.
30
* * *
Lily devours a stale cheese sandwich and knocks back a liter of apple juice before the plane lands on a cracked airstrip surrounded by barbed wire fence and, squeezed against it, a wall of knotted shrubs.
Will sits across from her again. He looks even more ragged than earlier. Fatigue has reddened the grooves in his skin, speckled his face with the beginnings of a gray beard.
“Almost there,” he says.
“What’s there?”
“The physical base of operations. Along with a room for the guest of honor.”
The plane bumps to a halt on the tarmac. Through the window, Lily can see no sign of an outbuilding or vehicle or any other aircraft. They could be anywhere but for the low, charcoal clouds she now associates with Eastern Europe.
“Are you going to put that hood on me again?” she asks.
“Don’t need to. And I have to trust you sometime, right?”
“Otherwise you’ll never let me go.”
“If you want to put it that way, yeah.”
It occurs to Lily once again that she may not survive to the end of the day. Somehow she’d assumed she was outside of things, immune, an informant who would be free to go once the job was done. This belief was based on her relationship with Will as much as wishful thinking.
“How long am I going to be here?”
“I don’t know. There’s a few things I need to secure first,” he says. “And then I have to figure out a cover for you.”
“A cover?”
“Where you’ve been the last few days. Who you’ve seen and why. If someone asks you about any of this, you need to have airtight responses, and we need to back them up on the records. Shall we go?”
“I need a drink.”
“More juice?”
“A real drink.”
“Come with me.”
* * *
ON THE TARMAC THERE’S A banged-up older model Mercedes and VW van in almost worse shape waiting for them.
“The budget doesn’t cover airport limos?” she says as Will opens the back door of the Mercedes for her.
“This is Romania. New cars get noticed,” he says. “And this isn’t an airport.”
He gets in next to her and the car rattles off past an unmanned security hut. Soon they’re on a two-lane road that takes them through fields that appear to be growing stones and a couple of villages with only a handful of stout, kerchief-headed women on the sidewalks.
She tries to remind herself that, at any moment, the driver may take a turn onto a quieter lane and Will will apologize, but she has to get out now, that it will go easier if she cooperates and doesn’t make any noise. It frightens her, but not as much as she would have guessed. So many other unreal things have happened to her over the last handful of days that the possibility of her own death feels like one more unsettling event among others. She can sustain this sense of distance so long as the car keeps going and doesn’t slow and turn.
And then the car slows and turns.
They bump along a rutted drive and into a broad woodlot with tight lines of planted pines on both sides. There’s no sign that they’re getting any closer to what may pass for a “physical base of operations.” Only the trees and the forest floor, a brown carpet of fallen needles.
“Almost there,” Will says, just as he had on the plane.
After several hundred yards the Mercedes comes to a stop. Ahead of them are two high fences running parallel. Bundles of razor wire lie in the space between the two. The road they’re on runs directly into them and, before part of the first fence and then the other starts to open, Lily saw no way of getting inside.
They drive through and into a paved square with several single-story cement buildings. Grass grows through the cracks in the pavement. Crude graffiti the only decoration on the walls.
The car drives to one of the buildings and a garage door is rolled up. Inside it’s dark. All the darker when the door closes behind them.
“Right this way,” Will says, getting out of the car.
Lily follows him to a door where he enters a security code in a panel. Beyond it there’s a fluorescent-lit stairway that descends farther than she can see.
Will starts down and Lily is behind him. She looks back to see if the driver or anyone else joins them but the door swings shut, leaving them alone.
The descent takes long enough for her to feel the wrongness of being underground at this depth and in a tunnel this small. Just as the cold perspiration begins to dampen her clothes they re
ach the bottom and start down a long hallway with a number of metal doors on either side. Lily looks past Will to see where it ends. Fifty yards on there’s a wall where the hall splits and carries on in both directions. The subsequent turns and breaks that follow put Lily in the mind of a maze, one that starts out simply but compounds in difficulty the closer you try to come to its center.
Will opens a door onto a narrower hallway with still more doors off it. He chooses one and steps inside. It reminds Lily of a holding cell at the Kirby: a single bed, a desk, a standing closet.
“This is my room,” he says. “You can have the one at the end. Bathroom is on the other side. If you’re planning on a shower, I’d lock the door. These guys down here are professionals, but I can’t vouch for all of them.”
Will pulls a bottle of Maker’s Mark out of the desk drawer, pours them each a generous shot, and Lily drinks half of hers down.
“I have a request,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I want to speak with him.”
Will ponders this. “I don’t see why not,” he says. “But I don’t see why either.”
“He was my client once, remember? The doctor in me likes to close her files.”
He finishes his drink in a gulp. “Whatever you want, Dr. Dominick. But now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’ve got some calls to make. I’ll knock later.”
Lily leaves and goes to her room at the end of the hall. She thinks that this may be her only opportunity to come up with a plan, a way of escape. But whether it’s the bourbon or the effects of being knocked out for so long she lies down on the bed and closes her eyes. Sleep curls around her like a cat. She’s about to give herself over to it when she jolts up.
He’s here.
There’s no sound other than the buzzing of the light in her room, no change in temperature or smell. But she senses his arrival all the same. Somewhere within the underground labyrinth the minotaur has been placed in his cell.
He’s here. But it’s not him anymore.
Her intuition tells her that dreaming is dangerous, especially when a spirit like his wants you, is searching for you. But she can’t resist and falls asleep anyway.
Almost instantly she dreams of a knock at the door. The knob turns on its own, the door slowly swings open. It’s Will.