The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” she said.

  “Now what makes you say that?”

  Silvana looked like she was about to say something, but then she reached into her purse.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them,” he said.

  She flipped her hands up away from the purse, and he checked the rearview mirror. There was no sign of anyone. He snagged the briefcase from the backseat and pulled out the gun. He was going to put it in his waistband when Silvana’s hands shot up like she was under arrest.

  “Whoa, whoa,” she said. “You’re American, right?”

  The way he looked at her must have given her her answer.

  “I’m not a threat or anything, okay? I love America,” she said, nodding to emphasize the last part, to show he could really take that one to the bank. “‘Great faces. Great places.’ Great people, actually—okay, most of the people. Not the enormous ones in jean shorts and Nike sandals who walk around Paris eating and pointing at everything. Perhaps you’ve seen one? Or ridden one?” She laughed. “This whole thing is a misunderstanding. I’m not a threat, okay? I’m not anything.”

  He glanced over. She looked like she just wanted to get a smile out of him. He was about to give her one when she swung the purse into his face.

  She clawed at the door handle again, and this time her fingers snagged the latch. The car door burst open. Somehow she’d already slipped her seatbelt. She was half out of the car when he caught her wrist. Even then she tried to fight free. But he yanked her back into the car. She dug her fingernails into the back of his hand, curling her lip as she did. Blood welled up out of the scratches. He let her dig until she lost her enthusiasm for it.

  “Please close the door,” he said.

  She pulled it closed as he hauled her the rest of the way back into her seat. He indicated the seatbelt, and she strapped it across her body. He didn’t let go until he heard it click.

  As they drove, Tom considered what he knew about her. The first thing he’d noticed was her English—she was well-educated and spoke with no accent. She dressed like someone with money or someone who came from money. And she must have spent a decent amount of time in the States. “Great faces. Great places” was a reference to Mount Rushmore.

  She must have been too preoccupied to notice, but her hand was bleeding badly. Tom handed her some tissues from his back pocket that had dried into a fuzzy mass. She stared at it, seemed to consider its sterility, then dabbed at her wound.

  “Apply pressure,” he said.

  “I know what to do.”

  “More pressure than that.”

  “I said I know what to do.”

  It got quiet again. Silvana already had a routine: she would look at him like something was on the tip of her tongue, then at the last second look away, exhale, and start picking at the vinyl on the dashboard. A minute later she’d be looking at him again, and the cycle would repeat.

  “My brother,” she said after another stretch of silence.

  “What about him?”

  “There’s no other reason those men would even know my address.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that.”

  “You know why the CIA would be interested in your brother, don’t you?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I know you know because you say I’m kidnapping you, and yet you don’t seem that interested in talking to the police. They know who your brother is. They probably know who you are too. And they don’t want either of you in their country, do they?”

  She looked down sadly at her fingers.

  “Your brother is Jonathan Nast.”

  She did a remarkably good job of not reacting.

  “I don’t know where he is or what he does anymore.” She said it like people came by asking about her brother every week.

  “You took a trip with him to Nice last year.”

  She froze, but in a dynamic way, like someone about to throw a punch. “First of all, fuck you for even knowing something like that. Second of all, a lot can happen in a year.”

  “You went to Nice with your brother last year. Why?”

  The little muscles around her eyes tightened, as if the topic of her brother and their trip together was a wound that, touched too hard, would split wide-open. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded funny, like she was crying even though she wasn’t. “It was just a long weekend I planned for us.”

  Tom opened his mouth to say something, but she beat him to it.

  “You say those men back there were American,” she said. “You’re an American. Why would Americans fight each other over me?”

  Maybe she was smarter than he thought.

  “Let me guess,” she said, “you work for the American State Department, but you don’t really.” She started shaking her head. “No, that’s not right. If you worked for the American government, you’d need permission from the French government to be here, and there’s no way they’d give you permission to do what you just did. Which means you’re here on your own. You’re just some guy. Aren’t you?”

  A lot smarter than he thought. He wondered whether that was a very good thing or a very bad thing.

  “And what if I am?” he said. “Just some guy?”

  “Well, then I think I’m pretty much screwed.”

  “I can help you, if you help me.”

  “And what does that involve?”

  “Telling me what you know.”

  She looked outside, at an empty field next to the highway. “What if I wanted you to get me somewhere? Could I count on you to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course I can’t really trust you, can I?”

  “No, but think of it this way. I just saved you from two men trying to drug you and stick you in their van. How much worse could I really be?”

  “No, see, what you were supposed to say was ‘You can’t really trust me’ and leave it at that. Then I’d at least know you were somewhat honest. Instead you were clever. And a woman should never trust a clever man.”

  “So she should trust one who’s not clever, who’s a moron?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You know, anyone who’s motivated enough to do what those men almost did is motivated enough to keep trying.”

  “Berlin,” she said softly. “Would you take me that far?”

  Tom sat in the car. They’d stopped at a roadside café. Once Silvana went inside, Tom alternately watched her from the car and read the files he’d taken. From what he could put together, the files pertained to a project referred to only as “Prometheus.” But there was no description of it. He couldn’t even tell what the project’s purpose was.

  He noticed another man sitting in his car, a Citroën. The man wasn’t on the phone or eating, just sitting there. Tom watched him for a minute. It’s nothing, he told himself. The two cars chasing them had crashed. Nobody could have caught up to them yet.

  Are you sure there were only two cars?

  He pulled out the file on Silvana again. There were three known associates for her: her brother Jonathan Nast, Alan Sarmad, and her father, Dr. Alexander Nast. The tech had matched Jonathan Nast and Alan Sarmad to Eric’s shirt. But there was still one last man who’d never been identified.

  Could it be her father?

  The tech had told him that the DNA they’d gotten off the shirt from the last man had been more damaged than the others. It had been harder to match against their samples. They’d never considered that two of the men could be related to each other.

  Tom pulled the file on Dr. Nast. It was too large to go through in detail now, but flipping through, he found reports written by Nast and information about relatives in non-US countries. Still nothing to indicate his role in whatever was going on.

  He checked Nast’s travel in the past year. There was nothing, just empty space on the page. He went further back, but there wasn’t anything until August three years ago. Before that
date, there was information about every trip Nast had taken since he’d gotten his doctorate. But from that point on, not a thing.

  He’d disappeared.

  Right around the same time Eric had.

  Tom put the files back in the briefcase and sat thinking. He didn’t know what this amounted to, just that it amounted to something.

  For now he decided to focus on Alan Sarmad—because while Silvana’s father was a question mark, Sarmad wasn’t. Sarmad’s DNA was on Eric’s shirt. That was a fact. But eventually Tom would need to know about her father. And he had to be careful how he went about it. Like most things involving the human heart, like the heart itself, it was something that could be found only indirectly. On this, the rules were iron: the less you asked, the more you were told.

  Through the windshield, he looked at Silvana sitting by herself in the café booth. Her hands were placed delicately on the table. One hand was clamping a tissue on the other. And the way she sat there, so softly she almost didn’t exist, made him wonder whether, by taking someone who was probably innocent in all of this, he’d done a terrible thing.

  He sat watching her. Everything about her told him to let his guard down. She was about his age. She said whatever popped into her mind, which made her a bad liar. And then there was her smile. It was a winking smile that said, Maybe we can be friends. It was the smile of someone who had done wild, exciting things, and if this smile greeted something you said or did, then it had the power to make you exciting too. But worst of all, she was attractive. Attractive in a way he found devastating somehow. Her irises were a faded shade of blue, yet they were heavy, holding something sad, something she’d never share. Their contrast with her jet-black hair only enhanced the effect.

  But her brother had left saliva on the front of Eric’s shirt. He’d spit on him.

  And in the end, it took only one thought for Tom’s guard to return to a standing position: Silvana was far more likely to get him killed than the other way around.

  When Tom got out of the car, he noticed the man sitting in the Citroën was still there. He looked like he was texting.

  He thought back to Karl in the war room: They’re going to do a lot more than find you.

  He went into the café and slid into the booth across from Silvana. They didn’t talk. She fidgeted with some sugar packets, and once her coffee was refilled, she poured sugar into it until the mixture was, by his estimate, 50 percent sugar and 50 percent coffee.

  “So…” she said.

  It took him a moment to realize she was waiting for him to say something. He watched her.

  “You know, we’re not terrorists just because we’re a quarter Lebanese,” she said.

  “I never said anyone was a terrorist.”

  “And yet here we are.”

  “You don’t look Middle Eastern.”

  Her lips curved into a smile. “I know. I don’t look angry enough.”

  “There’s a file on you. They wouldn’t have created it without a reason.”

  “I don’t—”

  “If I don’t believe you, I’m not motivated to help you.”

  She swiped some sugar off the table. “I don’t know what you want,” she said.

  “They’re going to keep looking for you, you know.”

  “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Your brother.”

  Her face tightened, and she looked down at her hands. The left one was picking at the right, which squirmed like it didn’t like it. She crossed her arms over her breasts, holding herself, and looked him in the eye.

  “I have nothing to say about my brother,” she said.

  “Then tell me about you. Why did you go to Nice with him?”

  “I wanted us to do a weekend together, you know, like families do.” The little muscles around her eyes tensed like they had in the car. “He said he’d be willing to go to Nice, so I spent all this time planning our trip because I’m an idiot, and then when it came time to fly down, he actually showed up. We arrived and were actually talking for the first time in years, and everything was going so well, and then I heard him on the phone say he was there with his sister, and he laughed. And the way he did it was…I knew what it meant.” She looked down, exhaled. “He only went because he had business down there.”

  “Is Alan Sarmad in Nice?”

  She paused. “I don’t know who that is.”

  Tom patted the file he’d purposefully left on the table. “That’s not what my file says.”

  “Well, can I see it? It might be—”

  “No.” He left the file within reach, but she didn’t go for it.

  “I should have the right to—”

  “This isn’t a courtroom. I saved you, remember, from two guys trying to give you an injection in an alley.”

  He’d raised his voice. A woman at a nearby table turned to look at him. He stared back at her until she looked away.

  “Why are you doing all this?” Silvana said.

  “That’s not important.”

  “Of course it is.”

  Tom glanced out the window and then looked back at her. “I’m investigating a murder.”

  She didn’t have to say what she was thinking. He could see it in her eyes: Was it someone close to you?

  She looked down and stared into her coffee.

  “My brother dropped something off at his place. I only waited outside in the car,” she said. “But believe me, you don’t want anything to do with Alan Sarmad.”

  For the first time since she’d seen the gun, she actually looked scared.

  CHAPTER 12

  The quick response team had been a disaster. They’d done something worse than failing—they’d created a scene. There were already Facebook posts and tweets about the car chase and the accident it had resulted in. People were even discussing it in chat rooms. Other than the lonely perverts on Dateline’s To Catch a Predator, Karl hadn’t even known people still used chat rooms.

  What he needed right now was to find out as much as possible about the person whose address Tom had gone to. He walked into the war room and stood over James, one of the analysts he’d been given but hadn’t really wanted.

  “What did they say?” Karl said.

  James swiveled to face him. “Agent Blake was observed at the address with Jonathan Nast’s sister.”

  “She involved in any of this?”

  “Director Litvak said there was no evidence one way or another. They ran analytics on her and staked out her place for a while in case her brother came by. He never did, but the address was logged according to protocol. Want to see a photo of her?”

  James handed Karl the printout. The woman was young, pretty in an ageless kind of way. Could have been twenty—or thirty-five.

  If she wasn’t involved, why would Tom take her?

  “What do we know about her?”

  James swiveled back to his computer and read off the screen, “Born in New York. Lived with family in Hungary, Germany, and the UK. She graduated college in Paris. Still unemployed. No political activity. Doubt she knows who the prime minister of France is.”

  “What about personal activity?”

  “She almost flunked out of school once. She’s visibly drunk in a third of her pictures on social media. Other than two friends, there’s a pretty big cast of characters rotating in and out of her life. And there are no photos of her with family in years. Not a one.”

  “What’s she think of her shit-bag brother?”

  “She writes seven emails for every one of his. Seems he didn’t want much to do with her.”

  Karl stared at a picture of her standing by herself on a hiking trail. “So what’s she into?”

  “You mean besides sitting in cafés and not working?”

  “Everybody loves something.”

  “Youth unemployment here is 25 percent. There’s a whole generation of people like this. She’s floating.”

  “Well, she’s just landed on our chessboard, and now she’s up to her n
eck in shit.”

  “Wait, are we treating her as a source, or a target?”

  “Go to her apartment and see what you can find.”

  James nodded, and Karl walked into his office.

  He sat there for a few minutes, sucking coffee through a hole in the plastic lid and thinking about the look on Tom’s face right before he’d hit the water. There was this…acceptance in it. And that was odd because it just didn’t feel to him like the look of a traitor. Aldrich Ames was an alcoholic who sold his country out for the money. Robert Hanssen did it for the feeling of superiority—aided by a general whack-job quality Karl could never put his finger on. Traitors were just like most criminals. They were shallow. They hurt other people casually because it made their lives easier, and that meant they weren’t the type to willingly face drowning to death 200 feet underground.

  So the question Karl kept coming back to was one of origin: What possesses someone who would do this to join the CIA in the first place?

  The fact that Tom had joined the Special Activities Division instead of becoming an analyst told him a lot. As far as everyone in SAD was concerned, SAD was the CIA. In their estimation, the rest of the place was pretty much just churning out intel that was so meaningless, so devoid of any possible significance, that you had to laugh at it or you’d cry.

  —What? India may pass an initiative reducing its civil service staff? You wake the president, I’ll brief his college roommate’s brother’s wife and tell her little Sanjay is going to need a new job!

  It was an irony the American people had never seemed to understand: the most useful place within an organization whose stated purpose was to gather information was not in actual intelligence gathering. It was in operations.

  So why would a young man sign up for this—the real this?

  It was the way Tom stared into Nast’s dead eyes and found something he didn’t exactly hate in what he saw. It was a look Karl recognized. The work appealed to something Old Testament in a person. And if it offered job satisfaction, it was a blunt-force-trauma kind of job satisfaction. It was waving and smiling to some tyrant who didn’t realize he was walking onto train tracks. It was waiting patiently as the train swung into view.