The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  The side of the building they were against was angled on the woods and an empty weeded stretch of tarmac. They couldn’t go for the forest because that would bring them right back into the shooter’s sight line. But they couldn’t go the other way around the building: it was 200 feet of wide-open blacktop. If the shooter closed in, he’d have them in open shot.

  Fifty feet away, there were doors to a men’s room and a women’s room, both long forsaken and scarred over with rust. Tom grabbed Silvana’s hand and led her toward the women’s room. He had to hit the door a few times to shake off the decay sealing it shut. The next time he hit it, the door burst open.

  Bogasian was sitting in the driver’s seat with his legs on the passenger door. He put the rifle down, swallowed a mouthful of Egg McMuffin, and rolled up the window.

  He’d caught up to them on the road outside the motel, heading into Germany. When they went into the autohof, he’d followed them in.

  The parking lot was clear, so he screwed the silencer on his .38 and picked up the Egg McMuffin. The silencer was special-made out of an oil can and was about the length and width of a woman’s forearm. He nudged the car door open with his foot and went around the truck stop in the opposite direction Tom and Silvana had taken—in case they were trying to sneak around the other side.

  Holding the McMuffin gave him a natural-looking reason to pin his arm against his side, which kept the .38 from poking through his jacket. On the walk over, he took a couple more bites.

  He stopped at the back corner of the truck stop and peered around it. Nothing but empty blacktop.

  He didn’t think they’d doubled back and gone for their car, and he was pretty sure they wouldn’t have crossed the original line of fire and tried for the woods. So he walked the length of the building and stopped at a men’s room and women’s room. One was caked with crud and looked as though it hadn’t been disturbed in fifteen years. The other was also caked…but not around the outline of the door.

  He pushed the door open.

  It was dark. The only light came from slats in the windows by the ceiling. He closed the door behind him and bent the doorknob down against the frame. Turning, he paused and listened for the sound of breathing.

  In the middle of the bathroom, there were chipped sinks with black holes rotting out like cavities. He went over to them and stooped down and checked under the stalls.

  He kicked the first stall door.

  Empty.

  He kicked the second. Also empty. By the third, he was beginning to think they’d actually hidden in the last stall. But when he kicked it open, it was empty. The toilet was missing. There was a hole in the wall where it had been shoved through.

  Bogasian hunched down and crawled through himself. There was about five feet of space behind the wall to allow a repairman access to the pipes for each toilet on the other side.

  As they ran out, Tom heard someone kicking the stall doors. The crawl space led to a concrete corridor that ended at a door with daylight glowing through the vents. They pushed the door open and found themselves back on the same side of the building they’d gone in. Tom slammed the door and gripped the doorknob and bent it down against the frame. Silvana looked at him, not comprehending, but then they were running for the car.

  They got in, and Tom grabbed the mess of wires hanging under the steering column and touched two of them together. The engine whined but wouldn’t turn. He reknotted the power wires and then held the starter wire against them. The engine shook without starting, but he kept holding it. He was looking for another car to steal when the engine finally fired.

  The shortest route to the highway was the narrow strip of blacktop that passed near the bathrooms. He decided to risk it. As he drove past the women’s room, a dent materialized in the center of the door they’d come out. It was so deep it made the sides of the door buckle inward.

  Tom couldn’t believe what he was seeing. If he’d tried the same thing, it would have broken his arm.

  Seconds later the door burst out of its frame, and a man stepped into daylight.

  In the rearview mirror, Tom saw the man stop and watch them merge onto the A7. There was something about the way he stood there. The calm of it.

  Tom kept glancing at the figure behind them until the distance made it disappear.

  CHAPTER 30

  The g-forces rocked Karl to sleep on the flight back to Paris. But his head kept falling forward, startling him. He’d be drifting off, the nervous energy draining off him, and then there’d be a falling sensation, and he’d jerk wide-awake. After ten minutes of this, he was wound too tight to sleep, so he gave in and stayed in that in-between state where he wasn’t awake but wasn’t in control of his thoughts either. When those thoughts led to Tom, he followed. But then Tom led him to his father. And his father led him back to Bell.

  Bell, South Dakota.

  Karl was a teenager. The economy had wet the bed, and the town wanted to condemn a piece of his father’s property, a little tract of bush and bird shit, and give it to some developer promising jobs. They were going to have a town hall meeting to approve it. People asked his dad not to go, begged him. They said there’d be trouble, and besides the project might not pass.

  But his father was going to that meeting. And Karl, he’d said, you are going to that meeting.

  Why, Karl asked.

  To see something.

  They didn’t talk in the car ride over, but Karl told himself that whatever happened he’d go down with his dad. He took pride in that, the kind of pride that somehow made him love his dad even more.

  When they pushed through the double doors, men set on them. The whole town was in there. Al Fincher, who owned a farm equipment distributorship and hadn’t had a down year in two decades, said in his withering, never-miss-church way: “Quality people don’t do this.” A neighbor who coached middle school basketball stepped forward. The man spoke softly, but he put his hand on Karl’s dad’s arm. He asked him to do the right thing and not speak, but he wasn’t really asking.

  You’re takin’ my property, you’re gettin’ my words. That was what his dad said.

  Then he broke for the lectern. Suddenly everyone was shoving each other. Some old guy pushed Karl, and Karl pushed him back. Even someone’s wife got in on it. Then he saw a kid hurl a Coke bottle, and the next thing he knew, his dad was on the ground, cupping his face. His nose was broken.

  The kid was maybe two years older than Karl. A man had his hands on his back, soothing him as though he was the one who needed soothing. No one said a word to him.

  Karl helped his dad up, and as they walked out in stone silence, he thought: This is what a rebel looks like. It’s not James Dean or rock ’n’ roll. It’s a man without friends who’s in the way. It’s someone who everyone wants to just recognize his own unimportance, but who won’t. Something in him just can’t.

  As Karl realized this, he wasn’t proud. He was scared, because there was no right or wrong in those people’s eyes, just need, a need that was bigger than his dad’s need, that was bigger than his dad himself. It was something he never wanted to be on the wrong side of ever again.

  Now Tom was on the wrong side of it. There wasn’t a nation in the world that wouldn’t take his life if it knew what he could do. And he was about to learn how alone he really was. He wasn’t just a man without a friend. He was a man without a country. And after last night, it wasn’t just the US government who wanted him dead. Karl remembered the lab, those men staring at him from their packaging. Whoever had done that would be looking for Tom, and when they found him, it wouldn’t be a Coke bottle that smashed his face.

  Karl thought of the look Tom had before he hit the water, the indifference of it. Then he thought about the events that could cause a young man to do such a thing, and he knew he wasn’t just going to get Tom medical help. He was going to help him escape, no matter who he’d killed or how sick he turned out to be.

  No peace came over him with this decision, though. Not li
ke he hoped. Because he knew the truth: when you helped a man without friends, you became one too.

  Two days after that town hall meeting, his dog had gone missing. She was a little mutt he’d adopted who looked like a golden retriever puppy even though she was full-grown. He went door-to-door to the neighbors, but no one knew anything. They found her three weeks later. She’d been hung by her plaid collar from a little maple tree.

  Back in Paris, Karl walked right through Marty’s reception area and into his office.

  “Excuse me, sir? You cannot just go in there,” the assistant said.

  Karl slammed Marty’s office doors shut and twisted the bolt.

  Marty looked up at him from a massive computer screen. “They just found Sarmad’s body.”

  There was some feeble tapping on the other side of the door. Karl banged his fist on the door, and the tapping stopped.

  “I found the lab,” Karl said.

  Marty just stared at him.

  Karl searched his face for a reaction. “It was just like ours.”

  “Was?”

  “I burned it.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “There were thirteen men inside. They’d been butchered.”

  “My god,” Marty said after a little too long.

  “You know anything about it?”

  “I’m a career politician, Karl, which means I’m a weasel, but I’m not a butcher.”

  “I’m going to ask you something, and I hope you can make me believe you. Did you know Eric Reese is dead?”

  “No.”

  Karl held up a still of Eric from the execution video. “I pulled this from a video on the internet. On the internet. How come no one at State ever asked us to ID him?”

  “Do you know how many videos there are like this? Too many.” Marty thought a moment. “How could Eric be connected here?”

  “These people we’re looking for, they didn’t just take Nast and the others. They went after everyone. And why would they do that? Because they’ve restarted their own version of Prometheus.”

  “We shut it down. We shut it way down. And we kept the pieces separate, so they couldn’t ever unite against the whole.”

  “These people got to Eric Reese and tried to make him continue his work. There’s only one reason they’d do that. They didn’t just want Bogasian. They wanted to create more of him.” Karl pointed out the window. “Our own program has been running for three years without our knowing it. And right now it’s out there somewhere, firing on all cylinders, controlled by people whose intentions we don’t understand because we don’t even know who the fuck they are.”

  Marty watched him a moment. “What is it, Karl?” His voice was soft suddenly, father-like.

  “I found a prescription pad in the lab. It had Dr. Nast’s name on it.”

  “You waited to tell me?”

  “You were the one who knew him. Was he really the type?”

  “When the sun goes down and the wolfsbane blooms, everybody’s the type.”

  “He was already a wealthy man. He doesn’t need the money.”

  Marty got up and went to the window. “People are greedy for far more than money. Need I remind you of Dr. Bull?”

  Dr. Gerald Bull was the Canadian engineer who developed a “supergun” for Saddam Hussein. It was basically what a howitzer would become if you kept it in a cage and tube-fed it male enhancement pills. It had a range of 600 miles and could fire a satellite into space. Like all the best scientists, Dr. Bull was obsessed with possibility—right up until it got him shot five times in the head. No one knew who’d done it, because pretty much the whole world wanted him dead. But it was a reminder that today’s hopeless romantic is tomorrow’s supplier of sarin gas.

  “Anyone who’d take a job like that has a touch of mad scientist in him,” Marty said. “You ever wonder why a guy like Nast would come work for us in the first place?”

  “Every time I saw him.”

  “His brother had early onset Alzheimer’s, and his old man spent ten years in a home with it. What offers the best chance of a cure? Stem cell research.”

  Karl didn’t say anything.

  “People from Prometheus are dying, and the only one left is Dr. Nast. Reminds me of the movie Ten Little Indians. You know how to tell who the murderer is? You wait until everyone else is dead.”

  “Only one problem with that: once everybody’s dead, it doesn’t really matter anymore who the killer is.”

  Marty smiled. “Ah, but you’re assuming the people in question don’t all deserve to die.”

  Karl went quiet. Then he said, “I won’t lie. Opening that file and seeing Ben Kotesh in a pile of his friends, it almost felt a little bit like…Christmas morning.”

  Marty burst out laughing. “See, this is why I missed you. You’re the only person I can talk to about these things! I mean if you can’t dance on the grave of some piece of shit, then I’m sorry, but you’re just not having fun anymore.”

  “You know what I love about the CIA? It’s really the place for you if you’re a people person.”

  Marty burst out laughing again.

  “Nast does fit,” he said after they’d both gone quiet. “Who else could have performed the operation on Tom? Who else could have developed some remedial treatment for Bogasian, keep him civil enough to do their uncivil things? And his son had contacts with Alan Sarmad and Ben Kotesh. My god, he could have plugged his father right in.”

  “We need to be sure.”

  “I’ve never been sure of anything in my life.” Marty stood still in the window. “In the thirteenth century, did you know it was common to torture all the suspects in a criminal investigation? They believed if you failed to live a life above suspicion, then you weren’t entirely innocent. And you deserved to be punished for who you were as much as what you did or didn’t do.”

  “Sounds like the thirteenth century pretty much sucked. And I don’t want to kill an innocent man.”

  “Point is it’s easier to find out the truth about a man than it is about something he’s done. A lifetime provides decades of evidence. A specific action provides only a few seconds of it. Nast’s son was a bad man, doing bad things for bad people. Someone who raises a man like that might not be provably guilty, but he isn’t really innocent either.”

  Karl didn’t know whether he agreed—or couldn’t have disagreed more.

  Marty went back to his desk and sat down. “What about Tom?” he asked.

  “Three of the men Tom matched to his brother’s shirt are dead. That leaves one, and it could be Dr. Nast. Tom will be going for him. I have to get there first.”

  “I mean what are you going to do when you find him?”

  “Find out if he’s actually Eric’s brother.”

  Marty’s eyes searched Karl’s face. “Someone that dangerous can’t be allowed to just walk the streets.”

  Karl didn’t say anything.

  “If someone turned him, imagine what he could do. Even if he is Eric Reese’s brother, he’s Pandora’s box, and we need to close the lid. Kill one, save a thousand. That’s the math.”

  “But for once, the one is innocent.”

  Marty was quiet for a moment. “Does it matter?”

  They looked at each other.

  “Your problem is your concept of guilt. He may not be guilty in his heart. But he is in his effect.”

  They kept watching each other.

  Karl leaned forward slowly. “We got his brother killed, and now we’re going to kill him for doing something about it? If we do this, we’re nothing. We’re shit.”

  “Right now you’re having an emotional reaction.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of it, gambling with your chance to be a somewhat decent person?”

  “No, that’s what it takes to stand for something.”

  Karl stood up and headed for the door. “This is going to end badly.”

  “Not for us, it won’t. The agency is covered.”

  Karl
turned back.

  “According to my records,” Marty said, “Tom Blake is an operative who finishes a rotation in a week or so. Now, as for the young man causing all this trouble, no one seems to have any way to identify him. And I have no idea who he is.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Doubtful.”

  Karl yanked the door open so hard it shook when it hit the doorstop.

  “Karl,” Marty said, “kill him. There’s no option here that doesn’t end in that young man’s death. I’m sorry, but we don’t get to feel good about this one.”

  Karl walked back to his office. He wasn’t so upset that he couldn’t read between the lines. Tom’s very existence would point people to a technology no one was ever supposed to know about. And that was unacceptable. For Marty. For the CIA.

  And if Karl was honest, for him too.

  CHAPTER 31

  They’d been driving for twenty miles or so. Silvana’s eyes were glued to the road behind the car, but no one came up on them.

  The panicky sensation Tom had never went down. His fingers weren’t shaking—he was gripping the steering wheel too hard for that—but they wanted to.

  How had that man found them so fast?

  How did he do that to the door?

  There was a desperate childish voice in his head that wanted to call a time-out, so he could have a minute—just one minute—to think things through. He tried to tell himself he just needed a little while to calm down, but this wasn’t nerves. It was the feeling you got when you were outmatched.

  It was horrifying how young this made him feel. He wanted to say to that man or to Karl or anyone else coming for him: You can’t really kill me. I’m still practically a kid. Four years ago I was in high school. I was a mathlete.

  Karl’s voice answered him: They’re going to do a lot more than find you.

  He looked at Silvana again. She’d been quiet for a solid twenty minutes, her body shaking against the pleather car seat.

  “Who the hell are you?” she said suddenly. “No, what the hell are you?”