The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  It was a pretty good life for an orphan. For anyone.

  Then Eric left for Europe.

  CHAPTER 6

  Karl was asleep, or at least he was supposed to be. Marty had given him the key card to a room at the Hotel Lotti, and he’d come to lie down. He rolled onto his side, looked at the comforter, and thought about all those news reports revealing that hotel rooms were the fire hydrants of the human world: not one stick of furniture in most of them had been spared the mark of the beast in the form of some man’s semen. In some rooms, under UV light, it looked like a goddamn crime scene.

  One week ago to the day, his sister had tracked him down. He only answered the call because it was from a South Dakota area code. As soon as Tabby heard his voice, she started crying and said, Dad’s dead.

  He asked when.

  Three weeks ago. I called and called. I needed you.

  Tabby was his kid sister. It was easy to imagine her at the funeral home, already overwhelmed into submission, having to pick out the right casket while quietly calculating whether her credit card company would decline the transaction. Like Tabby, his father was someone he’d always been uniquely connected to. Unlike Tabby, his father was connected to him because everyone else was a little scared of the old man.

  Their family was a squad of undomesticated Irish homesteaders with a few grubby fingers on the white picket fence and, should one of those digits slip, a short fall back down into the great white trash. Every civilized thing his aunts, uncles, and cousins did, they did with irony. Hey, honey, looka me, I’m usin’ a friggin’ napkin. They were like dogs that had learned to walk and talk but still carried around a touchy pride about their origins as dogs.

  Two hours into Karl’s sixteenth birthday party, his father had come into the backyard streaking like a comet past the guests and the mismatched lawn furniture and then stood there smirking, barely contained, all potential energy about to go kinetic. He handed his son the keys to a fifteen-year-old Honda, and then—the big reveal—a six-pack and crash helmet. And he roared something. Three words.

  Let her rip.

  Everyone burst out laughing. But through the laughter and the screwed-up faces, Karl and his dad stared at each other, and they weren’t laughing. Because they both understood what his father really meant: Take it while the taking’s good because you’re like me and maybe you’ll crash, and maybe you’ll burn, and maybe you’ll wind up selling tires for a guy you used to know in high school too.

  And Karl had done pretty much just that. Shortly after setting fire to a $10 million lab outside Paris, he’d been arrested crossing the Canadian border with a man taped to the interior of his trunk. The guy dealt in cubes of uranium deuteride, and Karl had it on good authority—if the dregs of humanity the CIA called sources could be called that—that the cubes were destined for Europe, then Hong Kong, and ultimately for Iran. Which made sense. Smugglers liked to work their way down the border-security food chain.

  And Karl hadn’t phoned it in, because the ship with the cubes had been about to leave port, and he found out the guy had a girl with him, one he didn’t treat like a daughter.

  But that wasn’t what kept Karl up at night. That wasn’t a pimple on the ass of what kept him up at night.

  Phase one of Prometheus started with mice.

  Marty had read an obscure paper in the Journal of Regenerative Medicine about a stem cell experiment that had created “super-rodents,” and the potential applications of this technology were so obvious that Marty was worried another nation might get there first. Physically augmenting an operator was the answer to the problems that assassinations inevitably caused. It wasn’t just Executive Order 11905, which outlawed “political assassinations,” or the UN Charter, which made them illegal anyway. It was the fact that it was extremely difficult to kill someone in a way where you’d never get fingered for it.

  Actually it went beyond that. Since Korea, warfare had changed. It wasn’t enough to win wars. You had to win cleanly. Targeted killing—that was the future of warfare in an age when the whole world was watching, and some people were beginning to realize America’s military technology had gone in the wrong direction. Everything was casualty-happy, designed for the battlefield, not the streets. No civilization since the dawn of man had ever maintained its dominance in the face of a major change in military tactics. No one had been able to let go of what had served them so well. The Assyrian chariot got trampled by the Scythian warhorse. The Greek phalanx fell to the Roman legion.

  Maybe, Marty said, they could change all that.

  Ian Mesrop Bogasian was born in nowhere, Ohio, to Armenian carpet importers. He was the embodiment of a fading American ideal: the kid without perfect grades or some freakish athletic talent who inches his way up in the world the unglamorous way—with his eyes to the sky and his nose to the grindstone.

  Bogasian joined the army on the G.I. Bill, becoming the first person in his family to go to college. After graduation, he re-upped for military service, this time to become a Green Beret. Two years later, when Karl made his approach, he was a rising star and a strong candidate for Delta Force.

  For a certain type of young person, there was nothing in this world as disappointing as the realization that adult life wasn’t filled with feats of strength or tests of character but with procedure and paperwork and the kind of compromise that grinds big ideas to dust. So when someone like Karl showed up, representing an elite within an elite, and asked guys like Bogasian whether they really wanted to be all that they could be, they tended to say: Fuck. Yes.

  They met outside a roadside diner, facing the hundred-year-old tombstones at a Presbyterian church.

  “Know why you’re here?” Karl said.

  “No. Colonel McVries said to come meet a guy.”

  “He tell you anything else?”

  “He said you were a liar and an alcoholic. He also said that he wished that you were a member of a protected group because he’d like to commit a hate crime against you.”

  Karl didn’t smile. “That’s very funny. Tell him he’s buying tonight. I work for the CIA.”

  Bogasian nodded. Guys on the teams were known for their titanic egos. Bogasian seemed different. He wasn’t eager to be flattered by all this.

  “I want you to apply for a new initiative that’s about to go live,” Karl said. “It’s an experimental program to enhance the human body.”

  “If you don’t mind me saying, what the hell does that mean?”

  “We’re going to sever the nerves in your back, then the nerves in your arms and legs. Then we’ll go to work on your musculature. We’re going to hurt you. Very badly. Then we’re going to heal you. That process will turn you into something very unique.”

  “And after that?”

  “Well, this is where I’m supposed to tell you we’re looking for a new type of operator. But that term doesn’t begin to describe this role, what it means, what it will cost you.” Karl leaned forward almost imperceptibly. “You want to know what we’re looking for? We’re looking for a criminal.”

  Bogasian didn’t say anything.

  Karl leaned back and stared at the dilapidated gravestones. “We want someone who’s willing to break every major law of every country he steps foot in.”

  “That what you do?”

  “Yes. And let me tell you what that means. People will hate you if they find out what you’ve done, even the people you’re helping. Laws exist to legitimize violence against you, and conventional morality will say that you’re disgusting, that you’ve lost any claim to being a good person. You’ll be alone. In every way.”

  Karl handed him a card.

  “Call that number if you’re interested. You have three days.”

  It was customary for military personnel to transfer to civilian status before working for the CIA, thus severing the connection between them and any US government body. But they weren’t hiring someone for the CIA. In fact Bogasian’s transfer wouldn’t be a transfer at all. It was a
n honorary discharge.

  Two months later.

  A warehouse outside Paris.

  Someone read the risk factors to Bogasian, and he listened to them like they were something out of a cell phone contract and not the verbatim autopsy results of the dead mouse twenty feet from him. Within a few weeks they started “traumatizing” his muscle tissue and various parts of his nervous system. They did this for a very specific reason. Stem cells were special. They could turn into any type of cell in the human body, even cells that weren’t human. They could become part of a fingernail or a lung or a muscle. The scientists used the damage to attract the stem cells and in effect tell them what to turn into. But they weren’t using the body’s repair mechanism to heal. They were using it to enhance.

  Some of the stem cells they put into Bogasian came from his own body. Some they took out and used to grow more stem cells, which was horrifying for Karl to think about. The cells had the power not only to perpetuate life but to create it. Eric Reese, a young scientist on the project, once asked him, What do you call the cell that can make anything? He smiled. The God cell.

  But what they were doing was experimental. A lot of cells would be wasted, which meant they needed volume—but of a certain type. Benjamin Kotesh got them the bodies. He stole them from the morgues at French hospitals. Alan Sarmad arranged their delivery. And so Bogasian had the cells from at least ten human embryos—ten would-be people—pumped into him. His brain and spinal cord were juiced. His fast-twitch muscle mass was increased 100 percent. The size of his adrenal glands was doubled.

  He got everything the chimpanzees got before one of them tore two people apart outside Paris.

  “Hello?”

  Karl was vaguely aware he’d answered the phone. He prayed the call would offer something to occupy his mind. His thoughts were racing again, and he was sweating, and all he wanted was for them to stop.

  “Karl, it’s Tom. I’ve got something for you.”

  A half hour later, as day was about to break, Karl’s taxi dropped him off several blocks from a house in Saint-Cloud. It was one of the wealthiest areas around Paris. Some houses even had their own tiny yards. People would have worked for years to afford those yards.

  Karl found Tom down the street in a Ford coupe. These little Fords were everywhere, which was a strange sight for Paris, and Karl kept looking at them, half expecting to see a Virginia license plate or a red-blooded-American bumper sticker (MY KID KICKED YOUR HONOR STUDENT’S ASS).

  “So what exactly do we have here?” Karl asked as he plopped into the passenger seat.

  “I found this guy Jonathan Nast on Alan Sarmad’s contact list and decided to check it out.”

  It took Karl every ounce of his being not to react. Nast. It was another familiar name from Prometheus. Dr. Alexander Nast had been the lead doctor on Prometheus. Were he and this Jonathan Nast related or was it one of those coincidences he’d been trained not to like?

  “When did you find this?” he asked.

  “An hour ago.”

  “You haven’t attempted to make contact?”

  “I just got here.” He pointed at Nast’s mailbox. “Yesterday’s mail is still in there, by the way.”

  Karl grinned. “So either no one is home or we’re going to walk in on someone who may have just massacred seven men and is disciplined enough to never go outside.”

  “I can live with that.”

  “Screw it,” Karl said. “Me too.”

  At six in the morning, the neighborhood looked empty, but Tom and Karl made their way to the backyard like they owned it in case someone was watching. They pulled on latex gloves. Then Karl tried the back door. As soon as his fingers touched the knob, the whole mechanism fell out of the doorframe. He froze, listening for two things: the sound it would make on the pavement and the response it would provoke inside the house.

  But somehow Tom was already down on a knee in front of him. He caught the doorknob with one hand. When the other pieces of the lock hit the concrete and came up ringing, he silenced them with the other.

  They waited. But it remained quiet in the house.

  Karl realized he was staring at Tom and turned his eyes back to the door. He tried not to think about how quickly—almost instantly—Tom had reacted when the doorknob fell out. It reminded him of something. Someone.

  He pulled out two Sig pistols, both very small and very illegal. He handed one to Tom as they slipped through the door and swept the western side of the house.

  The place was decorated for a life lived after dark: a lot of black wood, Japanese screens, and pop art. There was a photograph of an eyeball and another of an emaciated teenage girl squatting over a neatly folded American flag. When the sun went down, the house probably looked nice the way a nightclub can look nice. But in the morning light, it was a place you woke up in and knew that somewhere out there, if she knew what you’d been up to, your mother’s heart was breaking. And Karl had a feeling the owner was the kind of person he would see on the street and vaguely want to hurt.

  In the living room, there were plastic takeout containers full of half-eaten food, and in the kitchen there were dirty dishes piled in the sink. It seemed like Jonathan Nast had been holing up in here for the last week or two. An empty SKYY vodka bottle sat on the carpet as though it’d been dropped there. Karl and Tom moved toward the hallway to the bedrooms.

  A clock radio went off.

  They spread to opposite sides of the hall and waited for someone to turn it off. When no one did, they followed the sound to the master bedroom. The pop song on the radio tinkled through the door. A young man sang that he was young and beautiful and he was going to shine so bright he would set the whole world on fire.

  The door was ajar. Karl eased it open and stood back. The door yawned on a master-bedroom suite with three door-size mirrors, two seventy-inch flat-screens, and an unmade bed with silk sheets.

  Karl left the music on and moved around the bed to open the curtains.

  Then he saw the body.

  The man was on the floor hidden behind the bed. There was blood around his mouth, and Karl didn’t have to touch it to know it was still slick.

  He knelt down. The man’s collar was messed up, and there was the beginning of a hand-size bruise on the side of his head. He must have died only a few hours ago. As soon as Karl got closer, he smelled something acidic and noticed the urine stains that had spread out like the wings of a butterfly down the insides of the man’s khakis.

  The voice on the radio sang about how even though youth fades, beauty never dies.

  Tom showed no reaction as he knelt over the man and stared into his face. He did this longer than he needed to before he felt the pockets and fished out a wallet. The ID inside confirmed it was Jonathan Nast. Tom slid the wallet back.

  Then for some reason he grabbed each of Nast’s hands and turned them over, examining them. When he was done, he continued staring at the body. Karl watched him.

  “We have work to do,” he said finally.

  The computer in the home office down the hall was still on. Tom went over and nudged the mouse. A password prompt appeared.

  “I think I can get in here,” Tom said.

  “Five minutes. Then we’re gone.”

  Tom tried a bunch of common passwords: 123456, password, Nast’s last name. Nothing worked.

  Karl looked around the office. “How old is this guy?”

  “Late thirties,” Tom said.

  Karl reached into the desk drawer, rummaged around, and came out with a Post-it note with a number on it. Tom typed it in, and Microsoft Windows slowly began to load.

  Tom gave him a look.

  Karl shrugged. “It’s a generation thing.”

  Tom went to My Documents. There were only two folders. Tom opened all the files and clicked through them. Nothing jumped out. Next he went to My Pictures. He stopped on a file labeled “Materials.”

  “Click on that,” Karl said.

  The screen froze as a huge fil
e loaded.

  Tom cocked his head. “You hear that?”

  It took Karl a few seconds. Then he heard a distant siren.

  Tom grabbed the mouse, steadied his hand as much as he could manage, and started closing all the files as fast as possible.

  “Just take the hard drive,” Karl said.

  Tom reached down to unlock it. He stopped. “They’ll know someone showed up after the fact and took it.”

  “What?”

  “The computer’s still connected to the internet. The service provider will know when it stopped sending a signal, and they’ll know that happened hours after the time of death.”

  “So what?”

  “When the police figure out it was someone else besides the killer who took it, their interest in the case is going to skyrocket.”

  “Shit.”

  Karl needed a minute to think. The siren got closer.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any way to stop that from happening.”

  “No, it’s already happened.”

  “The hell with it. Take it anyway.”

  Tom disconnected the computer and picked it up. Then they left the house and did their best to stroll casually across the lawn. The sirens were close now. They were opening the doors of the Ford when two police cars peeled around the corner.

  They drove right past the Ford and continued past Nast’s house, lights flashing.

  Karl started laughing. “What’re the odds? I mean what the hell kind of criminal commits a crime at six o’clock in the morning? At that point you may as well just get a job.” He glanced at Tom and laughed. “You should see the look on your face.”

  He hit Tom on the arm and took a big healthy breath.

  “God, I haven’t had this much fun since we killed bin Laden and found porn on the fucker’s computer.”