The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  He swept the flashlight around again. The room was empty except for a large white chest freezer. It sat against the middle of the far wall, perfectly centered, like an altar. He noticed a large padlock on it. When he walked closer, he heard the hum of a motor.

  He stood there watching it, then went to the office and found a hammer. On his way back, he kept looking behind him and down the corridors of purple doors he passed. His heart was slamming in his chest.

  In the unit, he put the flashlight on the ground behind him, facing the freezer, so he could see his work. The light threw his shadow on the wall. And as he jimmied the lock, he kept seeing the shadow and thinking there was a man walking up to him from behind.

  As he was prying the last bolt out of the freezer, there was a metallic crash outside. He froze, waiting for another sound. Then he clicked off the flashlight and walked across the room in the dark. When he opened the door and looked out, he found an overturned trashcan blowing around on the pavement. He closed the door. Locked it this time.

  He finished working the last bolt out. When he opened the freezer, he didn’t know what he was looking at until he saw the face.

  Karl lurched back, and the freezer lid slammed shut. The sound echoed around him. He took a few breaths, then opened the lid and looked in again.

  A young man was hunched over in the compartment.

  Ice grew over half his head like moss. He looked as though he’d snuck in and nodded off. And as Karl reached in, for a moment he felt like he would lightly slap him awake and tell him everything was going to be okay.

  But then Karl leaned in farther. Now he saw the rest of the man’s face.

  The man’s mouth hung open, twisted in fear and pain, like he’d died not just scared, but scared of something incomprehensible to him. His eyes stared out of the tight flesh-mask that was his face. It was a look unlike any Karl had ever seen. When most people died, even from violence, they died gently. The rest offered by death became easier than the fight offered by life, and they accepted it.

  This man rejected it. He’d died resisting and uncomprehending and rejecting it all.

  There was no body. The young man’s head was frozen into the side of a pile of ice and clothes. When Karl lifted a flap of cloth, he saw the back and sides of the skull had been surgically removed.

  He stepped back and let the freezer door drop shut. In the silence, the sound was startling.

  They’re trying to inject people. They’ve failed with this one, but eventually they’ll get it right.

  He opened the lid again, sat on the edge of the freezer, and kicked apart the ice and pulled out the clothes that had been wadded up inside. They were too stiff for him to rifle the pockets, so he dumped them on the floor and waited for them to thaw. He stood there for fifteen minutes, alternately watching the pants and going outside to check the road.

  When they were soft enough, he went through the shirt pockets first and then the pants. No wallet, only some change. He turned the pants inside out and noticed a little pocket accessible only from the inside. It was on the thigh, where no one would touch it during a pat down. Inside, a torn corner of stationery with an address: Bella Vista Hotel, 2567 Olivier. No city, no country.

  He plugged it into his phone. The Bella Vista Hotel came up outside Nice, France. But it was exactly one mile down the road from 2567 Olivier. Karl knew this trick: if anyone found the paper and checked the address, they’d think the man had simply written it down wrong. But the address wasn’t for the Bella Vista.

  His phone rang. James.

  “Sir, I’m just checking in—”

  “I need you to scramble a charter in London to fly me to Nice. And I need you to meet me down there.”

  James clicked off. Karl called a taxi and waited in a shadow by the road.

  Three years ago.

  They were two days into the procedures before one of the chimps picked the lock to its cage and killed two people outside Paris. Afterward, when Karl came to visit Bogasian, he was recuperating from two eight-hour operations that had traumatized every major muscle in his body, his spine, his adrenal glands, and his brain.

  His brain. It was all Karl could think about.

  When Karl appeared in the glass window looking into Bogasian’s room, Bogasian had perked up at the familiar face and somehow lifted his arm enough to wave. Karl waved back. He stayed even after Bogasian fell back asleep—as if being there could stop what would happen.

  Months later, Bogasian changed. First, it was his muscles. Before the injections, Bogasian could bench 275 pounds. After them, he could bench 645. That is, he could bench at least that much. At that point they’d run out of plates to add to the barbell.

  When he arrived, Bogasian could run at a top speed of 23 miles per hour. Usain Bolt, the world record holder in the 100-meter sprint, maxed out at 28 miles per hour. By the time Bogasian left, they clocked him at 37 miles per hour.

  Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, once said, “Science is my religion.” Karl had always thought that was the batshit-crazy nonsense of a mass murderer who’d wasted 168 innocent people. But the more Karl watched Bogasian, the more he understood Bogasian had a power that had only existed in imagination. And even then, even if you stopped to think about it, it was something that should only belong to a god.

  The project had been named after Prometheus, the Titan who according to Greek mythology had taught man to hunt, farm, and read. But when he gave man fire, the gods felt he’d gone too far. Zeus chained him to a rock where each day an eagle came and ate his liver, which would grow back because he was immortal, only to be eaten again the next day.

  Everyone thought the man they’d created was a miracle. For a while, Karl thought what happened to the chimps might not happen to the man.

  Then Bogasian said his brain felt different.

  For weeks, his eyes were red. Karl thought he’d been crying.

  One day he told Karl about the body of a boy he’d seen in Iraq. The boy had been hit by a truck and left on the side of the road. Bogasian said the way the boy was lying there, he looked the same way his college girlfriend did when she was sleeping.

  He was lucky, Bogasian said. He got out before he suffered, and for everyone else it was the other way around.

  He was crazy. That much became obvious to Karl. But what was scary was how good he was at it. Even though everyone else was becoming suspicious, Bogasian made sure not to do anything that might harden those suspicions into action. And once Karl brought up his concern about the things he said, Bogasian never mentioned them again.

  The more disturbed a person is, the fewer mistakes he is allowed. Soon Bogasian removed all error from his life and work.

  Meanwhile he was in a private hell that Karl couldn’t even begin to imagine. And a horror would be set in motion. If a person can be defined as what he has done rather than what he will do, then Bogasian, as Karl knew him, wouldn’t come out the other side.

  Neither would two women in St. Petersburg.

  A mother and her little girl. They were relatives staying the night with a target. Bogasian said they’d seen him. The newspaper said they were still asleep in their beds. It also said the fractures to their spines were consistent with a head-on collision at fifty miles per hour.

  CHAPTER 19

  After Tom and Silvana left Sarmad’s compound, Tom drove them to their motel. On the way back, he stopped at a little grocery, so they could get food for the night.

  “How much money do we have left?” Silvana said. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  He counted it out and placed the bills on the center console. “215 euros.”

  She sucked air through her teeth. They sat looking at the stack of bright red, orange, and blue bills.

  “That’s our nest egg,” she said. “Looks kind of sad, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m American. No matter how hard I try, this stuff looks like it goes with a child’s board game.”

  “I think it’s pretty.”

>   “It looks like it’s about to go to a rave.”

  She got out of the car and looked back at him through the open window. “So what’s our food budget for the next twelve hours?”

  “Fifteen euros.”

  “Each?”

  “For both of us.”

  “Fifteen euros…fuck me.” She thought about it. “You realize we’re going to run out of money. What about shoplifting? I mean, is that on the table?”

  He stared at her. “Would you like to shoplift?”

  “No, I’m too scared.”

  “But it’s okay for me to do it for you.”

  She grinned. “Like most people, I would never drive drunk, but if it’s late and I’m hungry, I have no problem whatsoever getting in a car with someone who is.” She put her hands on top of the car and leaned in, so their faces were close. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it pleases you that I’m beneath you morally. You know what? Almost all the money we have you took from me.”

  “I feel terrible about that.”

  “Clearly. I suppose if you decided to rape me, you’d expect me to stop thinking only of myself and start thinking about how we can work together to get it done.”

  He smiled. “You’ve been very helpful. I’d never deny that.”

  She leaned back, assessing him. “You’re kind of a strange guy, you know that? You’re silent for hours. And when I ask you something, half your answers aren’t even in actual words. ‘When are we stopping for food?’ ‘Mmmm, an hour.’ ‘Where are you from originally?’ ‘Mmmm, America.’ It’s like talking to Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade.” She imitated his voice in Frankenstein monotone and her own in sweet, blameless falsetto. “But then out of the blue, you just suddenly hatch into this social butterfly and won’t stop talking.”

  “Technically butterflies don’t hatch. They pupate.”

  “Yeah, I think we’ve isolated our problem right there.”

  It was awkward to look directly at each other with their faces just three feet apart. For a moment they both watched an old man in a white T-shirt work under the hood of a car.

  “Are you doing okay?” Tom looked at her. “With everything?”

  She thought about it, softened. “Yeah…”

  He turned back to the old man. “I could watch him all day. I don’t know why.”

  “He’s engaged in his work.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Or maybe you like it because he’s doing it without anyone else’s help.”

  He laughed. “Maybe.”

  They watched the old man wipe his hands and squint at the sun.

  “Thank you,” Tom said. “For working with me and everything. I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

  She seemed surprised, even flattered. And yet there was a sadness there as well. Like she wished more of life involved doing things that meant something to somebody.

  “You really aren’t like most other guys I know.” She’d stopped smiling.

  “How’s that?”

  “You seem like the kind of guy who goes home for Christmas break and then gets a job at the mall, so he can afford presents on his own.”

  She looked at the old man a bit longer and then held out her hand. He gave her the money, and she went inside.

  He watched her through the window. And when she took her time picking everything out, he took it as a sign that she wouldn’t run off and instead actually intended to stay and cook her dinner.

  While she was in the store, he took some cash he hadn’t told her about and went into a corner phone mart and bought two prepaid SIM cards and two Motorola phones with GPS. The man behind the counter asked for an ID and an address. Tom gave him Adrien Michel’s national identity card.

  When he got back to the car, Silvana was still in the grocery store.

  On one of the phones, he downloaded a GPS program designed to locate the phone in case it got lost.

  As soon as they got back to the motel, Silvana headed for the bathroom. While she washed her hands, Tom buried the phone with the tracking program in the depths of her purse.

  When she came out, she sat at the table and methodically consumed a slab of smoked Gouda cheese and 75 percent of a box of crackers. Tom ate a pre-made sandwich. They talked only when she stopped for air.

  Then Tom stood up and went to the door.

  “I’ll be back in a couple hours,” he said.

  “Are you going to do something—I don’t know—wrong?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t think it’s wrong.”

  They caught each other’s eyes.

  “You’re not bringing anyone else back here, are you?” she said. “That’s not what we—”

  “I don’t know anyone here, much less someone I’d bring back.”

  “What do you want with Alan Sarmad?”

  He just looked at her. Her eyes dropped down to the table, and she hunched forward, making her shoulders look tiny. It was awful, watching her sit like that.

  “What if you don’t come back?” she asked.

  “I left all our money in my bag. Well, your money.”

  She managed a small laugh.

  “I realize you could just take off with it. I’m really hoping you give me at least four hours before you do that.”

  She laughed quietly again. “I will.”

  “That’s what you’d say even if you weren’t.” He smiled.

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “I should be back in an hour or two.” He said it like it was something that would cheer her up.

  She nodded without looking at him.

  He left and closed the door behind him, softly, as though he didn’t want to disturb her.

  CHAPTER 20

  Karl sat on the charter plane, waiting for takeoff to Nice—to the address he’d found in the freezer.

  The tarmac was empty. The boarding area had been too. He hadn’t even seen the pilot when he got on the plane. People said the ocean was the last desert. But they were missing what was right in front of them. The last desert was what it had always been: the dead of night.

  It had been a long day, and he was boozing. Not a lot. Nothing crazy, but some. An old-fashioned of redneck vintage. Lots of ice, lots of bitters, and half a packet of sugar. It looked like pruno, the stuff prison inmates brewed in their toilets.

  He’d never been a regular drinker. He didn’t have beer after work or wine with dinner. But every so often the clouds parted and the moon got too close. Episodic drinking—that was what AA would call it. Shedding his inhibitions and doing exactly what he’d always wanted—that was what his father would call it.

  He smiled at that. Then in honor of his dad’s memory, he jimmied open the locked snack cabinet on the plane and emptied the enormous basket of pretzels and cookies into his bag and began pulling them out and eating them, one by one.

  His phone buzzed.

  “There’s something you should see,” James said.

  “What is it?”

  “While Nast was in Morocco three years ago, an American was murdered there. The thing is: I think it could be the guy from the photo in John Doe’s apartment.”

  Eric Reese, Tom’s brother. Karl hadn’t said anything to James yet.

  “Tell me you got a name for him,” he said.

  “He was never identified.”

  “Then how do you know he was American?”

  “I’m sending you the link. There was a video...”

  The clip was simply titled American Shot in Tangier. The young man in it looked about twenty-five years old. Though he was blindfolded and the video was grainy, Karl knew immediately that it was Eric Reese.

  The camera moved over him. Close in on the nose. Pan over to the cheek, which had a welt on it. Pull back to reveal that he was on his knees, caked with sweat. He was swaying back and forth a little, his hands tied behind him, and
Karl guessed he had a high-grade fever.

  Karl’s eyes stopped on his shirt. Blue-and-gray flannel. It was the one the tech had shown him.

  Eric lost his balance, and a hand reached into frame and righted him gently. The camera moved in on Eric’s face. It held this angle without moving. For a moment Karl thought the camera was going to be turned off.

  The barrel of a gun entered the frame.

  It stopped six inches from Eric’s head. The hand holding the gun turned slightly, and Karl saw a scar: two raised, pinkish zippers crossing each other, the result of a crude field dressing. Something about the hand turn seemed purposeful, like the scar was meant to be seen.

  A shot.

  Eric collapsed and was still. Karl put the phone down and sat without moving for a long time.

  Then he picked up the phone, zoomed in on the murderer’s scar, and saved it as a picture. He rewound the video until he could see Eric’s face. He sat there, staring at it, out of breath even though he hadn’t moved.

  He dialed the office in Paris. Henry answered.

  “Of all the guys who’ve been body-bagged, did any of them have a scar on his hand?”

  Silence on the other end as Henry searched through their photos.

  “Which hand?” Henry asked.

  “The left.”

  “I don’t think so. The scar, what’s it mean for us?”

  “It means our guy isn’t finished.”

  Karl hung up.

  There was an empty glass on the glossy wood table next to him. He raked his hand across it. The glass hit the wall of the plane with a thud but didn’t break. He’d wanted it to shatter into a thousand pieces.

  The video is over two years old, which means Eric had never gone home after Prometheus liquidated. Which means if he’d never met you, he’d still be on the East Coast, taking care of his little brother.

  He wondered if Tom knew he’d just spent two days with the man who’d recruited his brother and involved him in the very thing that got him killed. He remembered Tom during the car ride after finding Jonathan Nast’s body. He’d been too eager to hear about Karl’s wife and laughed too appreciatively at Karl’s jokes about Osama’s taste in porn. Like he was happy to be having a conversation with someone. Happy just to be included.