The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in my safe house.”

  “Who are you?”

  “He’s my father.”

  Tom’s head spun toward the doorway, the direction of the voice.

  Silvana.

  She stood watching them. Little nicks and cuts dotted her face. A purple hand-size bruise covered her right eye and ran across her face until it disappeared in her hairline. Tom let the man go and saw for himself it was Dr. Nast. Nast looked back at him and then walked out, favoring one leg.

  Silvana came over and set a bowl down on the table next to him. Tom could feel her proximity on his arms and chest. But she didn’t come closer. She stirred something on the tray and walked out.

  He had that feeling of warm soup on his stomach again.

  Tom jerked awake and sat up on his elbows. Dr. Nast waited until he settled back down, then continued wiping something over the wounds on his stomach.

  “These burns, you did them yourself?” Nast said.

  Tom didn’t say anything.

  “Whatever you used, it stopped most of the bleeding. Probably saved your life.”

  Tom watched Nast’s hand move over his sternum.

  “This is going to hurt a bit.”

  Nast tweezed at his stitches, and Tom looked at his hands. No scars on either one.

  “I think you know I’m not who you’re looking for,” Nast said, eyes on his work. “I worked with your brother at a subsidiary of Schroder-Sands. We were ‘recruited’ to work with the Americans to develop stem cell treatments for disease. We performed the procedure on the man who did this to you.”

  Nast tried to smile, but it came off as a wince.

  “They told us he had a latent form of muscular dystrophy. He was actually healthy, of course—though he didn’t stay that way for long.”

  Nast swabbed the skin that had swollen up around the scar under the stitches.

  “What went wrong with him?” Tom said.

  “Paranoia, eventually paranoid psychosis. Nightmares, hallucinations, increased propensity for violence and diminished remorse when he acted on that propensity.”

  “Why did he try to kill you?”

  Nast smiled his wincing smile again. “I doubt it is he who wants me dead. I doubt at this point he’s capable of wanting anything in the sense that you or I would use the term.”

  “So who does want you dead?”

  “I found out what my principals were really up to. After I left, I met with a reporter. His body was found in the Thames. A suicide, they ruled it. Then my brother died. They’ve been looking for me for years. My son…” He swallowed, dropping the word. “My son worked for them, and they used him many times to try to find me.”

  “There must be other witnesses.”

  “There were. You killed them.”

  Nast placed some gauze over Tom’s wound and began taping it.

  “I know it was you who killed my son.” His throat squeezed the words down to a whisper. “I do not think he deserved that. He was not an unredeemable person. But I understand why you did it…” His fingers never stopped applying tape.

  “I found four men’s DNA on the shirt my brother died in. I had reason to believe your son was one of them. I didn’t kill him, but I wanted to.”

  “Then who did?”

  “The same man who tried to kill you.”

  Nast stared at him for what felt like a long time and then touched him on the arm.

  “I failed my son as a father,” Nast said. “Karl told me the CIA has a word for the consequences others face as a result of our actions.”

  “Blowback.”

  Nast nodded. “Do you think you could ever forgive me for the blowback I caused?”

  Tom couldn’t say anything. His thoughts couldn’t turn the corner into actual words.

  Nast finished with the wound.

  He touched Tom on the chest as he stood up. “I liked your brother very much. He was everything my son was not.”

  Nast gathered his things and left, gently pulling the door closed behind him.

  CHAPTER 42

  Karl stood in the hallway outside Tom’s room because he wasn’t ready to go in. He looked out the window over the gray empty of East Berlin. One in every six buildings in this area was vacant, including the one he stood in. Another kilometer out, and it was like standing outside time in an infinite parking lot. The only things jutting from the pavement were the weeds and the casino-size pours of concrete that used to warehouse people.

  It had been easy to vanish here, because this place was itself vanishing.

  Two million human beings disappeared after the Wall came down. Now those who stayed were choosing to disappear. Everywhere across the former Soviet bloc, birth rates were down. Suicide was up. In many places, alcoholism was the most common cause of death for men. The UN estimated that by 2050 the population of Russia would fall by 25 percent, and the population of Ukraine by half. Russians now had more abortions than live births. Russian women were looking around, seeing what their children would become, and saying, Uh-uh, no way. And East Germany was right there with them.

  The East Germans survived secret police, neighbors who informed, and the mass collective potty-training of their children. But they wouldn’t survive their freedom. Fascism had killed twenty-five million people. Communism killed another seventy-five million. These people had worshipped the wrong thing, crushed each other body and soul in the name of it, and now they’d learned the price of being wrong. They’d lost something out there in the great big wash. And whatever it was, it took their faith in the idea that something about life was special. Something about it mattered. And so now all they got was reality, the facts.

  It turned out people didn’t live on those.

  Maybe saving Tom was an expression of faith in the face of fact. Maybe it was a chance to do something for someone he admired in a way. Do something beyond himself, better than he was. Or maybe it was just dumb. He’d go to jail for it, and no matter what he did, someone would come for Tom.

  But he was his father’s son. He’d done dumber things. Apparently he was going to keep on doing them.

  When Karl walked in, Tom’s shoulder was weeping a little blood. Tom picked off part of a bandage and tossed it in a garbage can with a misshapen tower of bloody gauze rising out of it.

  “Why were you on that roof?” Karl asked.

  “What do you want with me?”

  “I want to know something. How did you get here? How the hell did you do all this?”

  “I don’t know. I just did.”

  “Bullshit. People don’t just do this.”

  “That’s exactly what every system depends on: everyone being who they say they are and no one doing the unthinkable.”

  “I think it’s because most people care about their futures. Don’t you care about yours?”

  “I care.”

  “Let me tell you something. It doesn’t matter how right or how noble what you’re doing is. There are things the world just won’t let you get away with. Because it can’t. You stole a CIA officer’s identity. You stole state secrets and made deals with other countries. You even killed someone. Explain to me in what way your life isn’t over.”

  “People always say, ‘Think of your future.’ But what they really mean is do what you’re told and accept what you’re given. Well, I knew the odds when I went into this, and I thought they were good enough. So I jumped. And you know what? That’s what it takes to care about something.”

  Karl couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

  “You’re here to arrest me, aren’t you?”

  Tom was still defiant, but as all defiant people eventually find out, defiance is exhausting. That’s why it’s so rare. Karl stared at Tom and saw the exhaustion in his eyes. For a moment Tom looked like Karl had just said yes, he was here to arrest him, and now it was all over.

  “Wh
at are they going to do with me?” Tom asked.

  “I’m not going to arrest you.”

  After a while, Tom said, “You want to know what got me on that roof? There was a picture of Nast in the files. He had the scar from the video.”

  “He was in here earlier. You look at his hand?”

  “Nast said he worked with the people behind this. You know anything about that?”

  “Nast was our asset. Marty recruited him.”

  “Did he know he was an asset?”

  “No, and that made him the best kind.”

  “He said he worked with my brother. Did Marty recruit Eric too?”

  “No. I did.”

  Karl waited for the reaction, the explosion at what he had done. But Tom just sat there.

  “We called it Prometheus,” Karl said. “It was an experimental program to inject stem cells into operators in order to augment motor-nervous function.”

  Tom’s face tightened. “And Eric did this? He did this to people?”

  “He did it to one person, Ian Bogasian, our only test subject. He thought he was saving his life.”

  Tom’s eyes were unfocused, like he was listening to another conversation. “Where did you get the stem cells?” he asked.

  “From human embryos and fetuses that had been aborted.”

  “Someone put those in me.”

  Tom stared at him, his eyes anchored as his face contorted around them. He was trying to resist it, look normal, but the contortions went deep. They didn’t just change his expression. They changed his face.

  “When did you have the surgery?” Karl said. “Do you even know?”

  “Three years ago.”

  That would have been shortly before Eric turned up dead. Which made sense. Doing the first stage of the operation on Tom would ensure that Eric stayed on to fix whatever had gone wrong with Bogasian—because whatever it was would soon happen to his brother. But of course Eric hadn’t been able to fix Bogasian.

  “Nast told me about Bogasian, what happened to him,” Tom said. “I don’t have symptoms as bad as that.”

  “You will. Silvana told us about the episode you had in Heidenheim.”

  Tom crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the floor. He nodded slowly, already agreeing with what he had no choice but to agree with. Karl imagined him getting angry or shouting or crying. But Tom did none of those things. He just sat there.

  “I’m sorry,” Karl said.

  Tom looked up for a second, nodded an acknowledgment, and looked back down.

  “Nast thinks there might be something he can do for you,” Karl said. “But he isn’t sure yet.”

  “Is there anything I can do for Nast and Silvana, you know, while I still can?”

  The question surprised Karl. He looked at Tom and suddenly saw what had always been in front of him. It was something he’d seen in every corner of the earth, no matter how rich it was, or how poor. He saw a young man without a place in the world. He saw someone who was desperate to be needed—but wasn’t.

  “How old are you?” Karl said.

  “Twenty-two.”

  Karl shook his head, felt a stab in his chest. “God, I loved being twenty-two.”

  He imagined himself at that age, getting wasted with his friends and chasing girls like they were proof God loved him and wanted him to be happy. Then he imagined Tom sitting at home by himself watching a movie, which if it was any good would be the highlight of his weekend.

  “Don’t you have somewhere else you can be? Aren’t there things you want to do?”

  Tom said nothing.

  “I mean you ought to be tear-assing around with your buddies, breaking the law and upsetting old people with your loose morals and strong language.”

  Tom cracked a faint smile. Karl waited for him to say something, anything. But the silence was so complete it hurt.

  “Nast has to be able to threaten to go public,” Karl said finally. “Unless he has leverage, he won’t be safe. But there’s no hard evidence. It was burned in his apartment.”

  “In Sarmad’s basement, I found pictures of men who may have had the procedure done to them. On each picture, there was a number.”

  “Do you still have them?”

  “Bogasian got them, along with the Prometheus files and everything else.”

  “Do you remember the numbers?”

  “I saved them on a phone. Give me your number. I’ll forward them.”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  Tom stared at him. “Why not?”

  Karl shrugged.

  “Why aren’t you carrying your work phone?”

  “Just write the numbers down.”

  Tom searched his face and then got his prepaid phone and copied the numbers down. There were two of them. 20865228106670380, 57618443152121735.

  “What about the briefcase?” Tom said.

  “You need to forget about the briefcase.”

  “You said Nast needed evidence—”

  “Bogasian has it.”

  “But—”

  “You need to understand something. Whatever they did to you, it’s nothing compared to what they did to him.”

  “Those people turned my brother into an internet video, and they turned me into…this,” Tom said. “I can get the briefcase, and I can deal with what comes of it.”

  “‘What comes of it’ killed Dr. Nast’s wife last week.”

  Tom froze.

  “He didn’t tell you, did he? She died in the blast.”

  Tom’s eyes were wet, but the surface tension never broke. No tears came.

  “Take me,” Tom said. “Nast could use me as the proof he needs to go public.”

  “You think once governments find out what you are, they’re just going to let you walk around?” Karl watched his hand go out and touch Tom on the shoulder. “No one can ever find out about you, okay?”

  “Why are you doing all this for me?”

  “I liked your brother. And if we don’t figure out a way to treat whatever’s happening to you, I don’t think he’d like what you’ll become.”

  Karl was on his way into the kitchen when he overheard Silvana and Dr. Nast.

  “Why are you helping him?” Silvana said.

  Dr. Nast sighed. There was the sound of bodyweight releasing into an old chair. Karl was about to walk in—

  “I’ve never told anyone this because it wasn’t what I wanted.”

  “Dad, what are you talking about?”

  “They talked to me…three years ago.”

  Karl could hear the strangle in Nast’s voice.

  “They came to me. I wouldn’t agree, not after what happened the first time, but they mentioned you and your mother. So I went with them to the lab. There was a boy strapped to one of the tables. He was drugged, but his head kept moving. I performed the operation on him. They were in a rush. They didn’t even give me an anesthesiologist, so I flatlined him on the table and told the nurses he didn’t survive. I thought that was his only chance. I’d only performed one stage of the series of operations I did on Bogasian. After the nurses left, I sutured the bone flaps and called Eric Reese. When he showed up, he said the boy was his brother.” Nast’s voice dropped to a whisper. “We carried him to Eric’s apartment. That was the last I saw of either of them.”

  There was a heavy sigh.

  “And I think that boy is the young man lying in the bedroom over there.”

  Quiet.

  Then a sniffle. It was coming from Silvana, Karl realized.

  “Dad…” Silvana said the word softly, like it was a fragile, important thing.

  When Karl walked into the kitchen, Silvana had bent down and was holding her father in his chair. She was rocking him back and forth a little, and he was letting her.

  CHAPTER 43

  There’s no victory in revenge, someone once said. Tom didn’t think what he was after was revenge. Still he didn’t see the victory in it. Only the dead. Only Silvana’s mother.

 
; He stared at the ceiling, wishing he could explain to Eric that justice was a dead virtue. It didn’t create anything. And it could never give him what he really wanted.

  He knew Bogasian was the man he’d dreamed of finding, and he didn’t see how he’d ever be able to kill him. Whatever they’d done to Bogasian, it was far worse than what they’d done to him. He knew that now, just as he knew it would never be enough to kill him. He’d still have to find whoever put Bogasian up to it and whoever put that person up to that. So there could be no justice for Eric. Not because it wasn’t right. But because it wasn’t practical. It was just too hard.

  He thought of the files Bogasian had taken. If they meant Dr. Nast and Silvana could be safe, he could get them back. He couldn’t kill Bogasian, but he could maybe evade him.

  Tom rolled onto his feet. Immediately his hands went to his ribs. The pain surprised him. His eyes stopped on a couple rolls of medical tape. He started wrapping it around his torso, tight, holding everything in place. He pressed on his side. Pain. But low enough to make do.

  He started the GPS program on his phone. After the map loaded, he saw that the briefcase—or at least the smashed phone he’d left in it—was still in Berlin. About five kilometers away.

  He paused with one foot on the windowsill and the other on the fire escape. It was dark in the neighborhood, but he could see the lights of West Berlin in the distance. He stood watching them, imagining the life taking place within their glow, the life that was still possible for Silvana and her father. And maybe for himself too.

  CHAPTER 44

  Karl watched through the raindrops on the car window as the taxi drove past Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.

  When the Berlin Wall was still up, the checkpoint was famous for being the easiest way to escape from East Berlin into the West. Even so, people died trying. One teenager who tried to make a run for it in the sixties was shot through the pelvis. The guards left the boy tangled in the barbed wire for an hour before he finally died. Now it was a wholesome tourist destination. It was amazing, that a place like this could one day be boring.