The cab dropped Karl off at an empty office building. As the elevator smoothed upward, the thought crossed his mind that Marty might kill him right then and there—not for stashing Tom and Dr. Nast but for knowing about them at all.
At the top floor, Karl headed into an empty office suite. Five men he didn’t recognize took him to the conference room. He got the sense they were assets, not agents.
He and Marty sat across from each other.
“He told me about the file,” Karl said.
Marty turned to the others, and they walked out of the room.
“He told me about the scar you photoshopped onto Dr. Nast’s hand.” Karl shook his head, exhaled. “I want to believe there’s some logic here in service of a good intention. But I don’t see any logic. Or any good intention.”
Marty sighed. “Karl, please. I don’t have the energy for another conversation about our feelings.”
Marty leaned back, crossed his legs, and swept something off the tabletop.
“Tom shows up here three years after Dr. Nast had convinced me he was dead, and he does a search on Ben Kotesh, which I’ve flagged, so I have someone follow him. A week later Kotesh turns up in a hospital, and all his men are dead. So I connected the dots, and the line that resulted pointed at some other people…people who presented an issue and who Tom could help us find.”
“You knew the whole time?”
“No, I suspected the whole time. Was it illegal? Yes. Was it a crisis? You bet your ass. And guess what? I didn’t let it go to waste.” Marty stood up and started pacing.
“How did you know he’d move on the Prometheus files?”
“I gave it one chance in three.” Marty shrugged. “It’s a probabilistic world.”
“Nast isn’t involved. You could let him go.”
“It’s a little late for him to choose his level of involvement. Do I need to remind you of the officials taking a hard look into Schroder-Sands and what will happen if they catch even a whiff of the CIA? And after what’s happened to his wife, I don’t think we should rely on any outpouring of goodwill from this man.”
“Were you behind that?”
Marty didn’t say anything.
“Tom has to walk.”
“Where are they?”
Karl stared at the dark shine on the tabletop. It was like looking down a bottomless well.
Marty stopped pacing and sat back down, right next to him. “He impersonated a CIA agent and broke out of an embassy. He’s embarrassed a lot of people. But I don’t want to kill him.” Marty was quiet for a moment. “I want him to work for us.”
Somehow that scared Karl more than Marty wanting him dead.
“He’s not a threat,” Karl said.
“He’s perfect is what he is. He’s a cutting instrument wrapped in skin.”
“He’s sick, and it’s getting worse.”
“Then we’ll treat him. Nast could even handle it. We’ve had our differences, but I’m willing to mend fences.”
Without looking up, Karl said in a quiet voice, “Marty, to be honest, sometimes I wonder whether you were pushed from your mother’s loins or whether you somehow ate your way out.”
Marty chuckled, like Karl had conceded something. “We’re working on something big, bigger than Prometheus.”
Now Karl knew for sure. The lab outside Sarmad’s didn’t belong to someone else. And that man you executed, he was also one of Marty’s.
“Tom has tolerated the stem cells better than any living thing we’ve ever observed,” Marty said. “There’s so much we can learn from him.”
“I thought he was Pandora’s box.”
“You know the funny thing? I still believe all that. I just have no intention of actually following it.”
“When you’re done with him, we both know what you’ll do to him.”
Marty stared out the window. When he spoke, his words were soft but emphatic: “It’s a fraction of a fraction of the human population that inflicts all the misery on the rest. A third of all Muslims, 500 million people, sympathize with terror groups, yet only a tiny percentage actually join one. Violent repeat felons comprise less than .25 percent of the population, and yet they inflict almost all the most serious crime on it. Civilization is doomed because it takes a thousand men to build a bridge and only one to blow it up. And we have a technology that completely turns that on its head. With Tom, we have a way to cull the worst of the worst from humanity and never get caught. Isn’t that the reason you joined the CIA?”
“He’s a nice kid, you know that? I actually think you’d like him.”
“I didn’t realize you were one of those people who value something based on how warm and cuddly it is. So that’s your morality? Puppies?”
Marty got a sad look.
“How many kids did you kill in Iraq, Karl?”
Karl just stared at him.
“How many died because of a strike you called in? I bet you don’t know. I bet you made a point of not knowing. Now think of all the children who won’t die from our bombs because we have Tom. We’d be taking one life and redistributing it to thousands.”
Karl folded his hands, unfolded them. “You’re probably right—he is only one kid. I mean, look, I’d love to put a sack over his head and give him to you and all. It’s just that, well, I’m afraid I like the little rascal too much to do that.”
“As it is, he’s so dangerous we can’t let him go, so I think this is a pretty sweet compromise. Now if you don’t like that, if you think it tramples a tad hard on the traitor’s rights, then I’m sure there are some wonderful anarchists in California who’ll let you join them in their world without compromise, but you’re going to have to worship Sheba the moon goddess and renounce all toilet paper. Now tell me where the fuck Tom is.”
Karl didn’t say anything. He just hit Marty so hard he felt the bend in the bones of his hand.
Marty grabbed his collar and punched him back. They stood up together, swinging. It was messy and silly, like a hockey fight. The door banged open. Four men ran at them and peeled them off each other. One pinned Karl against the wall with his forearm on Karl’s windpipe.
Marty nodded at Karl’s hand. Another man grabbed it and, with Karl resisting the whole way, spread it against the wall. A third man took out a large Glock and leveled it so the barrel hovered about three inches from Karl’s index finger.
“The bullet won’t shoot your finger off,” Marty said. “It will blow it apart.” When Karl didn’t say anything: “It’s your index finger, Karl, and then it will be your thumb. And frankly I just ate, so let’s not put ourselves through this lightly.”
The man with the Glock cocked the hammer.
Karl choked out an address. “Heinze 55, 6B.”
One of the men plugged it into his phone and showed it to Marty.
“East Berlin,” Marty said, still huffing as he straightened his shirt and smoothed his tie. “I love it.” Then he picked up his phone and dialed. When someone answered: “We already have an address, but just in case, I need you to run a utilities search within a three-mile radius of Heinze 55 in East Berlin. Check for any places where the water usage is up over 100 percent this period. On second thought, they’ve been taking care of a wounded man. Make it 200 percent.”
This was an old tactic of the East German secret police, checking water usage to see if someone was hiding another person.
“That kind of hurts my feelings,” Karl said.
“I like to think I know you pretty well. If they’re not at Heinze, they’ll be nearby. The funny thing about East Berlin: even twenty-five years after the Wall came down, it’s still a wonderful place to disappear.”
“This really isn’t necessary.”
Marty stared at him sadly. “Let’s hope not. Otherwise you owe me a finger, Karl.”
CHAPTER 45
Teenagers danced on the poles of the U-Bahn subway car, which was painted school-bus yellow. They were dressed in uniforms of drab green with the words WO
RKER RAGS and CITIZENS OF HUMANITY scrawled on them in blood-red. The clothes were vacuum-sealed to their waifish bodies. And for a few minutes the car was a commune Dance Dance Revolution on wheels, complete with a greasy long-haired man who smelled of patchouli and never took his eyes off Tom’s crotch.
The rest of the passengers watched the kids or didn’t watch them, but either one, they did with utter blankness.
Nothing can climb very far above the everyday, Tom thought. Not for long anyway. This is how you go to face the person who took everything. You take the six train.
Tom sat, looking at the floor. He thought of Silvana’s mother for a moment without meaning to.
One of the girls on the train was dancing in front of him. This went on for a minute before he realized she was dancing to him. She motioned for him to get up and join in. Her friends were giggling. He looked up at her and tried to manage a polite smile as he shook his head. But as soon as she saw his face, her hips lost the beat.
“Sorry,” she said in a British accent. “Sorry.”
She danced, now with no enthusiasm, back to her friends.
The car pulled into the station. Tom got off and walked through a cavern slathered in cartoon-green paint to the nearest exit. The map on the phone took him to a two-story brick apartment building surrounded by houses. He walked around to the backyard.
In the window of the front unit, a woman was pointing a carving knife at a tall man who was keeping himself between her and a massive glistening ham. She was going for the ham. He was going for the knife. The guests around the dinner table were laughing and cheering as the man made a little show out of holding the ham high, like a waiter, out of the woman’s reach.
He passed another apartment. In one window, a woman was standing in a dark room, her face inches from the glass. Her eyes were cataract-filmed and white, like a corpse pulled out of a river. She wasn’t looking at him, but she was pointed in his direction. Like she knew he was there.
He pressed himself against the side of building, unsure what he’d just seen. When he went back, the window was empty. And he knew it had been the entire time.
He looked up to the second-floor apartment. Dishwater-gray light from the unit barely pushed out into the night. He worked his fingers into tiny holds in the brick latticework and climbed up.
The first thing that struck him was how much the place resembled his apartment in Paris. There was nothing on the walls. No television. The only furniture was a Formica kitchen table and a couch that looked like it rented with the place. And the only sign that a human being had actually been here was the broken glass on the kitchen counter.
Droplets of condensation were still stuck to its sides.
The window was locked. Tom dropped back down into the yard, where he’d noticed a small shed. He found a trowel inside and thought he could use it to pick away at the windowpanes.
Then he saw the duct tape.
He tossed the trowel.
Back at the window, he worked a coin out of his pocket and ran the edge of it over the glass. Slowly—and thus quietly—he peeled off strips of tape and pressed them against the windowpane. Then he molded one of the strips into a handle and hit the glass with his palm until it broke. The shards stuck to the tape, and the tape dampened the sound.
Tom pulled out the glass, reached in, and flipped the lock. He guided the window up and slipped into the apartment. He knew it was a good idea to close the window, but he still got a tight, trapped feeling when he did.
The briefcase wasn’t in the living room or the kitchen—if it was here at all. The only way into the rest of the apartment was through a long unlit hallway. He wasn’t sure just how far back the hallway went because the light from the kitchen died ten feet down.
The apartment was the absence of noise or movement. And he was disturbing it. As he waded deeper and deeper into the unit, the absence played tricks on him. He kept spinning to see things that he never got eyes on and freezing to hear sounds that never repeated.
A noise from the kitchen.
It ran jagged through the silence. He ducked into a bathroom and listened for footsteps. There weren’t any, only the noise he now recognized as the refrigerator cycling on.
Click. Whir. Click. Whir.
He became aware that his back was to the rest of the bathroom. Little hairs tingled on his neck, waiting for a disturbance in the air. He turned around, holding his breath, preparing for a face mixed with the shadows.
The shower curtain was halfway closed.
He crept up to it. Slowly he reached out and with his fingertips nudged the curtain open.
Click. Whir. Click. Whir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r.
No one there.
He eased back into the hallway. The refrigerator noise would cover the sound of someone coming for him. He kept going. It was like walking into the ink of a Polaroid. As his eyes adjusted, the darkness moved into the vague shape of a hallway. He tried to stick to his peripheral vision. Since the eye’s rods were more sensitive to light than the eye’s cones and since the rods were concentrated on the edges of the retina, the best way to see in the dark wasn’t to look directly at something but toward a point near it.
At the end of the hall, he reached the master bedroom. The door was half-open, and across the large room he could see the dead neutral light of a laptop screen. As he walked closer, he noticed two multicolored lines were chasing each other around the black screen saver. And within their glow, he saw the briefcase.
Air moved across the hairs on his neck.
A line dropped from the top of his vision. It was colorless, a bend in the light. He flinched, putting his hand up to protect his face. He only realized the line was a wire when it cut into his throat, trapping his hand in the process. He smelled something metallic. When the person behind him worked the garrote back and forth, he realized it was the iron in his blood.
The wire stopped only when it hit the bone in his hand. Tom went soft and allowed himself to be pulled backward, which took some of the pressure off.
Then he swung his elbow behind him.
It connected with something hard but with a little give. The garrote loosened enough that he broke for the hallway. He got close. His free hand was clamping on to the door frame—
Then he seemed to run into a clothesline.
The garrote was again yanked tight. An object in motion stays in motion, and his legs ran out from under him and scissored into the air. As soon as he landed, gasping, flat on his back, he realized he was being dragged by the garrote farther into the bedroom. He could feel the loops in the carpet under his fingernails.
When he came to a stop, he started to work his fingers under the wire, but it just dropped off his neck. He shot up and went to take the first step of a flat-out sprint to the hallway.
Then the door shut, and the room went pitch-black.
Tom froze. He needed the light from the laptop to orient himself, but Bogasian must have shut the lid. The room was so dark that Tom’s sense of space was wasted. He couldn’t tell whether he was facing a corner of the room or the center of it. He strained to hear. And he didn’t move. He didn’t even think about moving.
A drawer slid open.
One second stretched into two, two into five. Then along with his sense of space, his sense of time was wasted too. He could have been standing there twenty seconds or two minutes.
Something grazed his arm.
There was the intricate sound that movable pieces of metal make against one another. He clawed in front of his face until one hand hit something. He grabbed it and pushed it to the side. Light shot out around his fingers. The silencer of the handgun wasn’t even a foot from his face. He’d pushed it just enough to direct the barrel away from his chest. The muzzle flash lit up the room.
As Tom went for the gun, Bogasian shook him off. Tom hit the floor and rolled through the dark.
Another muzzle flash.
Bogasian fired randomly into a tiny chair in the corner. The room went dark ag
ain. There was a moment of quiet, and then another flash lit up the room. Bogasian had moved. Now he was in the next corner, firing into a closet door.
This was the process of elimination. And Bogasian had just ruled out half the room.
Bogasian fired again, this time into the wall Tom was a few feet from. As the light expanded past them, their eyes snapped together. And as everything faded to black, Bogasian was already swinging the gun on him.
Tom dove out of the path of the light. He rolled on the floor—didn’t stop—and bounced up to his feet. The room lit up again, and a hole appeared in the spot on the carpet where he’d just been.
He stayed in motion while Bogasian fired. The quick succession of muzzle flashes had the effect of a strobe light—each flash revealed the two of them in a new pose. Tom saw a heavy-looking green ceramic lamp. The room went dark. By the time it lit back up, he had it in his hands.
Bogasian stopped shooting and listened for him. Tom floated in his direction.
Bogasian fired again.
Only this time, Tom was right there. As the muzzle flash stretched out around them, he raised the lamp in both hands over Bogasian’s head. And as the whiteness snapped back like a rubber band, he brought the lamp down.
And Bogasian turned.
With a look that said: ?
The shock of the lamp against Bogasian’s skull vibrated the bones in Tom’s arms all the way up to his teeth. Tom hit him with the lamp again and again. Until it broke into pieces. Then he beat him with the pieces.
As the ceramic broke away, Tom looped the electric cord around Bogasian’s neck, turned, and threw him around his body. Bogasian hit the bedroom door so hard that both he and the door seemed to have been pressure-sucked into the hallway.
And Tom was on him.
He was punching and kneeing and elbowing and using every annex of his body that was hard, bony, and flat. He dug one hand into Bogasian’s neck, so he could hit him with the other hand. He could feel it with each impact, that he was beating the life out of someone. Just knocking it right out. And he wasn’t scared this time. And the feeling he’d wanted back on the rooftop, he now had. He had found the solution to his problems, and it was this man’s face.
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