The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  The skin on it jiggled with each blow. Bogasian’s eyes were open, but they didn’t see. It was quiet as Tom leaned over him. Except for the wet packing sound of his fist on Bogasian’s face, there was only the mild hiss of room tone.

  Bogasian’s eyes shut gently, a millimeter at a time. Not like a man losing his life but like someone achieving the rest he so badly wanted. Then he was no longer moving. Tom stopped.

  And he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t beat this man to death.

  He noticed his finger was dislocated and made a fist to try to pop it back in place. When he looked back down, Bogasian’s eyes were on him. Actually seeing him.

  Bogasian rose to his feet. They were toe-to-toe. Tom feinted to the left and swiped at Bogasian’s head with his right fist. Bogasian dropped a foot, just in time, and when he popped up, he swung the edge of his hand into Tom’s windpipe.

  Then he stood there and watched Tom choke.

  Tom couldn’t follow what happened next. He had no idea how fast Bogasian really was. Tom went to take another swing. Suddenly he was looking at Bogasian from three feet farther away, like he’d been teleported backward. And his cheek was bleeding where Bogasian had split the skin.

  A fist hit his stomach, and Tom felt a pop in his abdominal wall. The next thing he knew, he was on his back and trying again to inhale, but his chest was so deflated he didn’t have the physics to open it back up.

  As Tom flopped around on the floor, Bogasian disappeared into the bedroom and reappeared with the briefcase and the gun. The action on the gun was open, but once he got back into the hall light and pointed it at Tom, he saw it was empty and tossed it. As Bogasian stepped past him, Tom got to his hands and knees and slapped the briefcase, sending it end over end down the hallway into the living room.

  Bogasian crouched and swung at Tom’s head. Tom ducked, and Bogasian’s fist disappeared into the wall up to his shoulder. The impact coughed plaster into the air. Both of them squinted and choked on it. Tom rolled to his feet, wrapped his arms around Bogasian’s torso, and swung him like an axe into the wall.

  The drywall caved more than a foot, into a jagged outline of Bogasian’s head and shoulders. But somehow Bogasian was already on his feet when Tom came at him again. As Tom grabbed him, Bogasian used his momentum to spin him into the wall so hard the back of Tom’s head disappeared into it. White dust shot into the hall in thick clouds. They took turns coughing on it.

  Tom rocked back and forth, pulling himself out of the plaster. Then they were punching each other so fast Tom couldn’t follow what was happening.

  Suddenly Bogasian grabbed him, spun around, and drove him back-first into the wall on the other side of the hallway. Tom’s body hit a stud. Bogasian grabbed him again and slammed him back several times in succession. When Tom doubled over, Bogasian cupped his skull and hurled it against the wall. As Tom collapsed to his hands and knees, he saw ropes of bloody snot coming off his nose.

  Bogasian picked him up. Tom kicked him in the knee and punched him in the face. He went to throw a bigger punch. His torso twisted and then released with his fist at the end of it. Bogasian caught his wrist, plucked it right out of the air. Tom went to hit him with his other hand. Bogasian caught that one even more easily than the first.

  He started to twist Tom’s arms past the limits of each joint. They stood with their faces a foot apart, straining for position. Tom dropped his eyes to the scar on Bogasian’s hand. When he looked up, Bogasian was staring at him. Like he wanted to ask him something.

  Tom found his footing and tried to drive Bogasian backward, but Bogasian flipped him over his hip and threw him, face-first, into the other wall. Tom didn’t just hit the wall this time. He crashed through it and collided with the floor. Immediately he vomited. Facedown, unable to move, he told himself, Get up, come on, get up. That was when he heard the police siren.

  A window broke somewhere in the apartment.

  When he staggered into the living room, he saw the entire window structure was missing. There was no sign of Bogasian—or the briefcase—in the yard.

  CHAPTER 46

  Bogasian turned onto Heinze Street and headed for the rendezvous point. When he was close, he slowed the car. Three black sedans were parked outside. He reversed into a connecting alley and rolled the driver’s seat back so his face would be out of the glow from the streetlights. Then he texted Here on his phone.

  Almost immediately a car door opened. Marty got out, and Bogasian rolled the window down. Marty didn’t make eye contact as he came over. He just pointed to the briefcase on the passenger seat.

  Bogasian handed it to him and watched him place it on the hood and open it to verify that all the files were inside. Satisfied, Marty snapped the case shut and stood looking around in every direction but Bogasian’s.

  “Is everything else in order?” he said.

  “He came to the apartment.”

  “How would he do that?”

  “He put a tracking device in the briefcase.”

  Marty’s eyes moved to the case.

  “I got rid of it.”

  “We’re searching the building now. We need you when he returns.” Marty stood there a moment, still looking around, then went back and stood by his SUV. Bogasian got out of his car and waited near him.

  A group of men streamed out of the front entrance of Heinze 55 and walked to the black cars.

  “The building is empty, sir,” one of them said.

  Marty snapped his phone open. “This is Martin Litvak. Code-in is…” He patted himself. Searched his inside pockets. “I need to request an override. I can’t find my device.”

  A pause on the other end.

  “You know what? Just connect me to 316.”

  Another pause as they transferred him.

  When someone else picked up, Marty said, “Karl gave us a bad address. Shoot him.”

  He was quiet for a moment.

  “What were the results of the utilities search?” He listened and then said loud enough for everyone to hear. “Schleizer 77. Apartment 8D.”

  Karl saw the man Marty had left behind walk past the conference room window and look in on him.

  He’d be coming in with a gun once Marty realized the address was bad. What was unclear was whether he’d be coming for Karl’s life or just one of his fingers. Karl stared at his index finger.

  Then he looked at his barely there reflection in the window. The figure staring back at him looked haunted. He thought of how his dad, in some grim, back-alley, Irish way, would be amused by what he was about to do, and even though the thought did nothing to increase his odds of survival, it made him feel a little better.

  By now Marty would have reached Heinze.

  Karl stood up and pressed himself against the wall next to the door.

  A minute later he saw a shadow on the conference room window as the guard looked in again. When the man threw open the door and rushed in, Karl clotheslined him. The man’s face went slack momentarily as the back of his head hit the carpet. Then suddenly he was conscious again, and his hand shot to his hip and extended with his sidearm. Karl dropped to his knees and grabbed both of the man’s hands.

  Slowly he was able to use his bodyweight to push the gun up over the man’s head. Once the man’s arms were out of the way, Karl released one hand and dropped an elbow on the man’s jaw with all his might. He did it over and over until the man went limp.

  The other men must have gone with Marty because the suite was empty. Karl let himself into Marty’s office.

  The sun had set, but still he left the lights off. He took out Marty’s remote-access security device, which he’d palmed while Marty was punching him in the face. There was a string of ten numbers on the key card that changed every thirty seconds. Marty was still logged onto his computer, but when Karl went to access the system, he got a coded challenge. He entered the number that flashed on the card.

  Once he was in, he saw two things: the Prometheus files were not hard copy only, as M
arty had claimed, and they were a shell of what they should have been. If someone were to look them over, they would guess that as far as Marty knew, the project had never gotten off the ground. But there was something else.

  A reprimand from Marty to Karl. It even had Karl’s signature, forged to acknowledge receipt. In the letter, which was dated three years ago, Marty directed Karl to confine his work to actionable projects and stop making off-market purchases of stem-cell-rich “body parts.” Also per “numerous requests,” Karl was to end the experimental program testing stem cells on lab animals. Finally he was to end contact with the three men he’d been using to acquire the stem cells: Benjamin Kotesh, Jonathan Nast, and Alan Sarmad.

  There they were—all the men who killed Eric except for Bogasian.

  Now Karl knew why Marty had brought him back. Oversight committees, the inspector general, prosecutors—they weren’t stupid. When something went wrong, the senior person on a team would do absolutely anything to pin it on the junior person. If any of this came to light, the people asking questions would expect Marty to swear up and down that it had all been Karl’s doing, that Karl had acted without his knowledge.

  But Marty wouldn’t do that.

  Karl could almost picture the interview. Marty would insist—insist—that Karl was one of the agency’s best operatives. He’d get angry on Karl’s behalf. They would take out the reprimand—Marty would never point to it himself, the bastard was too smart for that—and Marty would say of course Karl stopped screwing around with stem cells when asked to.

  And they would believe him, because only one thing explained why he’d stick his neck out to bring Karl back: he was Karl’s victim too. And the more they thought about it, the more they’d wonder: If Marty Litvak were the one running an illegal stem cell experiment, why in the hell would he mention its existence in an on-the-record document?

  Karl had one of those out-of-body moments where a person can look back and see his situation with almost total objectivity. And what he saw was the perfect person for Marty to pin this on. The casting was so good he kind of admired it.

  Almost as an afterthought, he entered the two seventeen-digit numbers Tom had shown him into an online GPS program. He’d known as soon as Tom had given them to him that these were GPS coordinates. He had to play around with the decimal points, but eventually he figured out that the first number was for Haiphong, a port in Vietnam.

  From there, it was a short drive to China.

  The second number was for Kodiak Island in Alaska.

  From there, it was a couple hundred miles to Russia.

  Karl sat there a moment, not believing what was right in front of him. Marty had not only kept the Prometheus technology from the CIA, he was now selling it to the Chinese, the Russians, and God knows who else. And he was using Bogasian to kill off the people who’d helped him.

  Except his plan hadn’t been working. The men in the barn were dead. Which explained why he wanted Tom so badly.

  CHAPTER 47

  Bogasian pulled to a stop along with the other cars outside Schleizer 77 and rolled down his window. The men got out of their cars and glanced at him. Quick glances that lasted only as long as they needed to.

  Marty’s window went down, and the others came to it like flies.

  “This building is empty except for 8D,” Marty said. “Cut the power.”

  “What if we can’t locate them?” one of the men said.

  “Then burn it down.”

  Bogasian looked up at the eighth floor. He thought he saw two blinds being held apart snap back together.

  The men went to their vehicles, pulled out rifles and night-vision goggles, and filed into the building. When Bogasian got out of his car, Marty was already on the phone. His window was still open. Either he didn’t know Bogasian could hear him or he just didn’t care anymore.

  “We’ve found Nast. We’ll have Tom soon,” Marty said. “Is the lab ready?”

  The voice on the other end said something about Karl.

  “Then he’ll be on his way here. That’s fine. Bogasian is in play.” Marty snapped the phone shut and noticed Bogasian. “Tom and Karl will be here any minute,” he said.

  Bogasian nodded and went to turn around.

  “I want Tom, but otherwise your tasking is broad. That means everyone else in the building.”

  Bogasian looked at the front door, thinking about the men they’d just sent inside. He looked back at Marty, who nodded.

  “Everyone.”

  Bogasian crossed the street and walked into the building. If it really was abandoned, it had only recently been given up on. The fixtures hadn’t been vandalized much, and there were no desperate manifestos spray-painted on the walls.

  The stairwell was massive. Twenty feet of open space with a staircase winding around it. A heap of smashed furniture sat at the bottom. When he reached the eighth floor, he saw dark shapes darting in and out of rooms. He took out his sidearm and tapped it on the railing. Four men materialized in the doorways, rifles trained on him. Bogasian lowered his gun and pointed to 8D.

  “We already checked it,” one said.

  Bogasian didn’t reply. He just walked into the apartment.

  The one who’d spoken led the others in. His hand went up to his earpiece, and he listened for a moment.

  “Okay,” he said, and looked over at Bogasian. “He says to search the neighborhood.”

  “No,” Bogasian said, “go to infrared.”

  The man hesitated.

  “Do it right now.”

  Reluctantly he toggled the infrared.

  “Scan the couches and chairs.”

  Bogasian stared at the man until he complied.

  The man went around the room and stopped by the couch. “It’s still a little warm,” he said.

  “Then they’re still here.” Bogasian turned to two of the others. “You’re bottom up. The rest of us are top down.”

  They went to the roof, which was clear with no escape to adjacent buildings. Then they began to work their way down, floor by floor.

  CHAPTER 48

  There were no lights in the apartment, and Tom noticed the shiny, unusually clean cars by the curb. They didn’t fit the neighborhood. Someone would be watching the front of the building, so he went around back and yanked on a double door until it opened. He wanted to tear straight up to the eighth floor, but it was quiet inside and that told him: Maybe you want to be careful.

  He moved silently up the stairs, staying close to the wall. If anyone took a quick peek down the stairwell, he wouldn’t pop from the background.

  When he reached the seventh floor, he heard two creaks. They were close together. He slipped into a hallway and waited. And when he wanted to go—felt he had to go—he made himself wait just a little longer.

  A shadow moved at the end of the hallway.

  He saw the movement more than the shadow.

  It stopped.

  Then it crossed the hallway. Darkness domed over the other side of the hall like a hole in the building. The shadow merged into it.

  Tom heard feet scuff the floor. The sound was coming from an apartment down the hall.

  A thud.

  Someone cried out.

  Tom was already halfway down the hall when he heard a voice: “Where is she?”

  Dr. Nast was standing with his arms up. Tom careened into the bedroom right as Silvana stepped out of the closet and swung a closet rod at the gunman. She knocked the three-inch-thick goggles off his face, seemed to like it, and wound up to hit him again. But the gunman stepped backward, creating space, and trained the rifle on her head.

  Tom reached over the man’s shoulder and shoved the stock of the rifle down. The muzzle swung up, away from Silvana, and the stock slid out of the man’s hands.

  The gunman got over this very quickly. The rifle had barely left his grip before one hand dropped to his waist and came up pointing a handgun. He turned the gun on Tom.

  But Tom turned with him. Then Tom g
rabbed him by his shirt and whipped him against the wall. The man’s head slapped off it. Somehow he stayed on his feet and staggered back in the direction he’d come, the gun still in hand. He was leveling it when Tom punched him so hard his jaw caved an inch into his face. The concussion left him on his feet. His gun paused on Tom’s chest, and for a half-second Tom could only look down the barrel, waiting for the light at the end of it.

  The man collapsed on the floor.

  Tom picked up his rifle and pistol. When he turned to Silvana, she was staring at him.

  “You came back,” she said.

  When she saw his face, her lips formed a gasp, though she didn’t make a sound.

  He surveyed Dr. Nast’s chest, looking for the bullet wound. But Nast pointed down to his thigh. There was a tiny harmless-looking rip in his pants. As delicately as possible, Tom rolled him over and found another small rip.

  He nodded at Nast, relieved. “It went through.”

  He tore the arm off Nast’s shirt and tied it around his leg. With his hands clamped on Tom’s wrists, Nast fought his way to his feet. Once he was up, he didn’t let go. He looked at Tom and touched him on the forearm and smiled. His eyes were wet.

  Tom handed the pistol to Silvana, and the three of them slipped out of the room and made their way to the stairwell.

  Footsteps.

  They froze. The footsteps were coming up the stairs. The hallway was too open to fight from, so Tom steered them into the closest apartment.

  But the shooter must have seen them.

  Slugs gouged through the walls right where they’d been standing. Tom shoved Nast and Silvana to the floor. Wood split. Windows shattered. A chunk of plaster dropped out ten feet from Tom’s face.

  The shooting stopped. Then the shooter jammed his gun into one of the holes he’d created. There was only room for the muzzle of the rifle, so he fired blindly at them. Tom dove out of the way as bullets punched into the floor.