“I don’t know what it is, but something about you keeps telling me you’re a good person even though I hardly know you and”—she laughed sadly—“I really have no reason to trust you.”
He went to walk past her. She shifted her bodyweight, leaning in his way.
They were about a foot apart. Now he couldn’t help but look into her concerned blue eyes. On their own, they were nice. But as the epicenter of the wounded look on her face, they were too much for him to look at.
Remember her father.
She was still staring him down.
Except now something about her was open. He moved toward her. He didn’t know why. He just did it.
She didn’t flinch this time. Her mouth opened a little, and he kissed her. Then they were pressed together, and his hands were running over her body and hers over his. And he couldn’t stop cupping and re-cupping her thighs and her butt because they were so smooth and tight and like the surface of a ball he couldn’t quite get hold of.
Silvana hopped up on the counter with her knees apart. She curled one leg behind his, guiding him between her thighs. Their pelvises bumped lightly, and he felt her other leg wrap around him, locking him in place. His body fit perfectly, like it’d always been meant to be there.
The bathroom rug slipped underneath his feet. They fell halfway to the tile, laughed into each other’s mouths, and went over to the bed. They dropped themselves down side by side, and he squeezed her chest against his until he felt the bend in her sternum. She pulled him on top of her.
And there was nowhere else to go. No next step. For the first time since Eric died, he found something that didn’t lead him somewhere else. Except deeper into the place where he already was.
CHAPTER 34
Karl walked into the war room. Everyone was either talking on the phone or typing in front of a laptop. They looked like a bunch of MBA students doing a group project to hunt down and kill enemies of the state while simultaneously rationalizing a company’s supply chain. He sat between Henry and James.
“Silvana Nast. Have you gotten anything new about where she might be taking him?”
“We got something else—an incident at a truck stop near Heidenheim,” James said. “Two couples got into a screaming match of some sort, and somebody called the cops. Description of one of the couples: an American male in his twenties, brown hair, brown eyes, six feet, and a female with black hair and ‘light-colored’ eyes.”
“They released all that over a little argument?”
“Apparently someone saw them go behind the building. When an employee went back there, she saw that two doors had been completely destroyed, and there were bullet holes in a soda machine. The Heidenheim police just put out a press release on their website.”
“Map the route from Nice to Heidenheim.”
James pulled up the map and turned his computer so Karl could see it. Tom and Silvana—if these two people at the truck stop were actually them—were well into Germany. They could be going anywhere within it.
Karl was relieved Tom still had the girl with him. She was his acid test. He didn’t think she was involved in any of this, so if her body turned up in a ditch, he’d have to revisit this whole idea of helping Tom.
“Write down her address for me,” Karl said.
James wrote it down on a piece of paper and handed it to him. “There’s one other thing,” he said. “Those fingerprints came back a few minutes ago.”
He typed something on his laptop and brought up a picture of the man who Karl had killed last night.
“His name’s Dorian McKittrick.”
“American?”
James looked over. “He works for us.”
With great effort, Karl pushed the words out. “What was that?”
“He’s an employee of the CIA. He’s in the National Clandestine Service in counterintel.”
Karl pictured Dorian McKittrick kneeling at the base of a tree, trying to shoot a half-inch slug through his face at 1500 miles per hour.
At the bottom of the bio page, Karl looked under “Family.” McKittrick was married with two children: Elizabeth and Lindsay. They lived in Virginia. The girls were probably on their way to school right now. Probably they were rushing to catch the school bus or taking too long in the bathroom or swapping horror stories about some boy who could make his arm fart the alphabet.
James was staring at him, trying to read his reaction. “What’s the significance of this guy?” he said.
“Nothing yet. Just a theory I’m working on.” Karl walked out. He dialed Marty.
The man whose teeth you blew out the side of his mouth was not only an American, he was your coworker.
Marty’s voicemail told him to leave a message, and he hung up.
Karl looked at Silvana Nast’s address. Then he did something he probably shouldn’t have and actually went to it. It was stupid, going to the apartment of the girl they’d tried to grab off a public street. But he needed to find out if she knew her father’s location.
He broke into the building with a bump key, which he used only because he refused to walk around foreign countries with a pick and a tension wrench. Upstairs he saw a notice from the police on her door. He knocked and waited ten seconds. Then let himself into the apartment with the bump key and went right to her MacBook.
He opened the lid, and the operating system started up. A password prompt stopped it cold.
He opened the top drawer of her desk to look for something with a password scribbled on it. To begin with, the drawer was so jammed full of stuff he almost had to rip it out just to get it open. Then he saw the exact nature of what he was dealing with. There were about a hundred scraps of paper with to-do lists on them, a fistful of parking tickets, thirty loose Altoids breath mints, a tampon wrapper (ripped open in seeming haste), a Gordian knot of old cell phone power cords, a piece of chocolate (melted, tooth marks), a three-carat yellow diamond ring, and two tubes of hand lotion, each of which was crusted with and yet still leaking moisturizer out the nozzle like some sort of ceaseless, alien ejaculate.
The thing was a fucking petri dish.
He gave up immediately on finding a password written down in there and went to step 2. Years ago someone at the agency had put together a list of the most statistically common passwords. Apparently without knowing much of anything about a person, you had about a 90 percent chance of guessing their password—sort of like when you ask people to choose a number between one and ten, almost everyone chooses seven.
Karl tried 123456. He found something with a phone number on it—presumably hers—and tried that. Then he tried qwer1234.
The computer started loading. She hadn’t even tried to be sneaky by capitalizing the Q.
He went to Settings, then to Passwords. This new page showed a list of websites she used frequently and the username and password she used to log in automatically to each one. He went to a travel booking website. Under Past Trips, he saw she’d booked seven flights to Tegel Airport in Berlin in the past three years but canceled them all last-minute. He sat back.
She would only do that if there was someone in Berlin she was desperate to see—but couldn’t.
Her father?
Karl brought up her browsing history and searched for “Berlin” to see if she’d looked up an address before any of her canceled trips. One came up. It was for a Motel One near Charlottenburg. She’d want to stay somewhat near her father, so there was a good chance he was in the vicinity.
Charlottenburg. There was something familiar about the name.
He remembered Dr. Nast telling him about a brother-in-law who was making a killing through a minority interest in a friend’s property development firm. It had been selling properties around some high-rent part of town. Charlottenburg?
He logged in to Facebook and scrolled through Silvana’s Facebook friends, looking for family. She had about two thousand friends, which was just astonishing to him, so it took a while to find an aunt and an uncle who lived in Ber
lin. Elisabeta and Stephen Strasburg.
Elisabeta resembled Dr. Nast, so Strasburg must have been the brother-in-law. Karl clicked on Strasburg’s profile. But Strasburg was too old for Facebook. There wasn’t much there. Karl tried googling him. Not much there either. But an image search online showed pictures of Strasburg at various charity events with the names of the people he was standing with in captions below. Karl started plugging all of their names into Google to see where they worked. It took him almost half an hour. Then he found a man who was the CEO of the Charlottenburg Group.
That was it. The name of the company had Charlottenburg in it.
Karl googled property sales in the area and looked at the names of the companies selling them. The Charlottenburg Group was the first one to pop up. He went to their website and looked at a list of properties they’d sold in the last three years near Charlottenburg. There were two. And Karl bet there was a unit in one of those buildings that had never been sold and was still on their books. He wrote both addresses down.
As he got in a cab, he called James.
“Meet me at the airport.”
CHAPTER 35
Bogasian’s eyes flipped open, and he shot into consciousness. It wasn’t day yet, but there was a little light leaking in around the curtains. With his heart hammering in his chest, he slid off the bed. His arm was still swollen, and the skin was raised tight. He unwrapped the motel’s bar of French-milled cocoa butter soap in the tub and massaged it over the area. When he was done, he flossed and brushed his teeth.
The truck stop where he’d found Tom and Silvana was only six hours from Berlin, but he was certain they hadn’t reached it yet. After what happened, they’d move to back roads, which would turn a six-hour drive into a much-longer one. And once the shock of everything wore off, they’d crash.
They were probably going to the nice part of Berlin, which meant West Berlin. There were two routes there from where he’d last seen them: the A2 and the A9. Both led to the Berliner Ring, which surrounded the city like a beltway and could get them reasonably close to any place within it. He decided to focus on the Ring, which was a natural choke point.
Once they reached it, though, he couldn’t know which way they’d go: east or west. Not unless he helped make the decision for them.
He sat in his car at a truck stop, eating a McToast Schinken-Käse with a side of fruit and yogurt. A trucker driving a MAN flat-nose with a trailer pulled in and headed for the men’s room on the side of the building.
Bogasian got out.
Inside, the man stood in front of one of ten urinals, hips forward, bodyweight rocked back on his heels. Bogasian turned the lock on the door and walked over to him, checking the stalls on his way. They were all empty except for one with a piece of paper taped to it that said: KAPUTT!
When he was close, the man started shaking out the last few drops. Bogasian stopped four feet away and glanced around the room until he heard the zipper go up. The trucker turned, noticing him, and offered what sounded like a greeting.
Bogasian grabbed him. The man tried to resist, the whole time staring at him, wide-eyed—Why are you doing this? Bogasian pulled down until the man’s head was trapped under his armpit. Then he wrapped an arm around his throat. Their bodies faced each other. Once he walked them backward into one of the stalls, he locked his fists and strained upward.
The trucker’s feet came off the ground. With his eyes turned up to the ceiling, Bogasian cut off the man’s air supply using his own bodyweight. He held this position until the man stopped moving. Neither one of them made a sound.
Bogasian took the keys out of the trucker’s pocket, locked the stall, and climbed out over the top. Then he took the KAPUTT! sign and stuck it to the stall door.
He got in the semi and turned onto the A9.
At the junction, he merged onto the Berlin beltway going eastbound. And at the six-mile mark, he accelerated. The chug of the engine rose into a high spinning noise like the scream of a dentist’s drill. He swung the rig from the center lane to the far-right lane. Twelve tires liquefied on the asphalt, and the smell burned the air. As the momentum of the rig caught up and swung it to the right, Bogasian twisted the steering wheel left.
The rig cut across four lanes of traffic. The valves were shrieking, and the trailer started to jackknife as he collided with the center divider. When the whole thing rolled, he extended one arm against the steering wheel and the other against the back of the seat and held himself suspended over the pavement spinning and stripping everything in the window below.
It took 200 feet of friction to stop all the momentum.
By the time he slipped out the door, there was already a pileup eight cars deep. It would take at least a day to clear the wreckage. Since the cars were on the other side of the rig, no one saw him once he jumped out of the cab. He walked to the closest truck stop, smashed the window of a parked car, and drove it back to his car.
He switched vehicles and drove to the junction of the A9 and the beltway. This time he merged westbound—which wouldn’t be clogged with stopped cars—and found a place where he could see the Berlin-bound traffic and parked. While he waited, he thought about his life.
For three years, he had worked for people he didn’t really know or understand because he depended on them for medical treatment. They kept him alive for a price, and he found that price acceptable.
It was the same life Tom would have after they caught him. Once the side effects escalated, he would do anything just to make them stop.
Bogasian sat in the car for a long time, imagining this.
And he decided that once he killed the target in Berlin, he’d kill Tom too.
CHAPTER 36
Tom woke up and looked around for Silvana. She was sitting at the table wearing nothing except for a silver wax-seal pendant around her neck. Somehow it made her look even more naked. There was a large blue box in front of her, and she was chewing a donut with her legs crossed.
“There was a Kamps around the corner,” she said. “It thought it could hide from me, but I still found it.” She grinned.
He just looked at her, and she looked down like she too was just noticing she didn’t have clothes on.
“I was about to get in the shower, but the bear claw was calling my name.” She grinned again.
“How much cash do we have left?”
She sorted through her purse with her unglazed hand, paused for a second, and laughed. “We have one euro.” She held it up.
“Well, if we run out of gas, I guess we’ll just have to steal another car.”
“Why don’t we just steal some gas?”
“It’s easier to steal the whole car.”
She sat taking huge bites of the bear claw.
He watched her for a moment. “Why don’t you just unhinge your jaw?”
She started laughing, but her mouth was full, so it came out as little sniffs through her nose. She held up a hand to stop him from making any more comments until she’d swallowed.
Then she kicked out a chair for him. “Sit down.”
He didn’t move.
“Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“Eating like this…is this something you do?”
“Uh-huh. Now sit down.” She kicked the chair again.
He walked over and fished out a chocolate donut, and they ate facing each other. The only sound was their chewing. It was nice, doing this with someone he’d just spent the night with. He remembered Eric and his friends always seemed to have more fun together the morning after their nights out than they did on the nights themselves. He understood now.
They sat, talking about nothing in particular. Then Silvana stopped smiling.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said, and he got the sense she was working up to something.
“Sure.”
“What you’re doing could get you in some pretty bad trouble. You don’t seem that worried about it.”
“That’s not a question.”
&n
bsp; “No, I guess not.”
She kept watching him.
“So why aren’t you worried about it?”
“What is this?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I was just—it’s nothing.”
He took a small bite of a donut. He didn’t know why, but he was getting angry. He tossed the donut on the table. “I can practically hear you thinking over there. If you have something to say, you can say it.”
“Have you ever wondered whether your brother would want you to risk your life like this if it meant you never got to have a life of your own?”
He spoke in a low voice. “Some people murdered my brother, filmed it, and uploaded it on the internet. And I’m supposed to—what—turn the other cheek?”
“That’s not what I’m—”
“Or maybe we can sit down with Dr. Phil, and I can talk about my feelings, and they can talk about theirs, and we can see that there’s an ‘emotional truth’ here, and really what we all need to do is listen first.”
She stared at her bear claw with a look of utter sorrow.
“Of all people, I thought maybe you’d understand. My brother disappeared, and nobody would help me. Not the State Department, not the FBI. It was like he never even existed in the first place.” He could see he was hurting her, but he couldn’t stop. “Well, if my brother’s life mattered so little that nobody would do a damn thing, then you know what? I’m going to find the people responsible, and I’m going to make his life matter.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to, okay? I have to.”
Silvana kept watching him, then looked out the window. Her eyes were wet. For a moment he didn’t think she was going to say anything.
“Your life matters too, you know,” she said. “Maybe you’re too sad to realize that or you don’t have anyone to tell you that, but I’m telling you…right now.”
Her face screwed up, and the wetness grew in her eyes. “My brother’s dead. I haven’t seen my dad in years. And you, you—” She caught herself before she could say what she really thought about his situation. “Sometimes I think there’s just so much sad, incomprehensible shit in this world that the most you can hope for is to sit naked with some girl in a shitty motel and eat crappy, mildly chemical-tasting donuts together.” She looked down. “And it doesn’t have to be with me, okay? But when something nice comes along, you should take it. At the very least, do that.”
The Prometheus Man Page 23