by Ana Calin
The county library is one of the most impressive buildings in town. It’s big, cubic and ugly, inside-out white and massive with stone that looks like – but I doubt actually is – marble. To me it had always been a graveyard for books with a far too complicated search system.
It took a while to find the right little drawer where they’d listed Sinclair’s name and his only two titles, “Facets of the Nuclein” and “Psychology and Physiology, unlikely Twins” in the forest of boards. They were so low in demand that they hadn’t been introduced in the digital system, the staff explained.
I removed the slips and took them to the front desk, ordered them both, then took the stairs to the second floor to wait for the delivery. The books were allegedly too old and fragile to take home, and therefore could only be examined on site.
I waited, tapping the desk with my fingers, surrounded by tall bookshelves and a grave-like silence. There wasn’t a soul in the room besides me – no secret that barely anybody read outside the exam months. So I had the ticking clock and the rapping of my fingers on the desk as sole companions until a groomed librarian with long fingernails finally brought the books.
“Sorry for the delay, but they weren’t easy to find. We don’t get requests for the older editions much anymore,” she admonished rather than apologized. She scowled at me, making it clear that she didn’t appreciate me having made her search the deepest and – judging by the eaten covers and her smell – mold besieged basements of the county library.
She lingered a few moments, allowing me the chance to ask for forgiveness, but I was much too fascinated by the ancient appearance of the books. The leather covers, black and eaten by humidity and time, looked medieval rather than nineteenth century. Jewels, neglected gems. The pages were yellowed and caked together, so I was extra careful when separating them. The Romanian library didn’t make a safe place for such treasures that too few people knew about, and I instinctively wondered how many valuable pieces had been lost to negligence and decay all over the world. How much information had been out there that was forever out of our reach, forever destroyed?
The bits of intelligible content – much of it was faded and destroyed – read complicated and elaborate, not to mention much more advanced than what I imagined they knew back in 1891, when the book had been published. I barely made it through a few pages, but I gathered that “Facets of the Nuclein” furthered the work of the German Dr. Friedrich Miescher. It talked about how genes regulate the kind and amount of protein cells produce in order to complete different tasks.
With throbbing temples and a grumbling stomach, I took a break around noon. I got a bagel from a nearby baker, then went back to the library and on to the second book in the reading room. It was a bit lighter than “Facets of the Nuclein,” being divided in what resembled a “hardware” and a “software” part. I got most of the software – the psychology part – but physiology stretched out of my brain’s reach. I eventually gave up with an exhausted groan that scratched the silence.
It was past seven P.M. when I left. It had started to snow again, the first layers of sludge already in place, the evening mist glistening in the streetlights. I passed by the windows of busy cafés with the coat wrapped close around my body, and my chin tucked in the scarf, watching the boisterous groups inside. Girls were overly groomed with strident eye makeup and inflated lips, while boys acted the rich gangsters with golden chains, their napes folding with fat.
I took the bus home, half expecting him to emerge at any stop from around a dark corner or from the crowd. But, if he was anywhere close, he didn’t show himself even as I walked up the street to my parental home. Vasile and Chanel flanked me again, their tails still waggling as I closed the gate on them – with every intention of coming back, which they knew.
But, as I returned with a tray of chicken leftovers and bread in tomato juice, the cobbled street was empty and dark. Not a soul up or down, nothing but the ghostly street lamps that seemed to have swallowed my two scruffy old friends, and gave the night an air of Londoner danger. The bulb hanging from the overhang of the dump swayed alone in the wind.
A chill went through me from head to toe. I shuddered, as if Jack the Ripper might emerge in a blink from the haze and slit my throat. It was a premonition much stronger than anything I’d had before, a premonition of a danger that felt no lesser than the peasant in the mountains.
I dropped the tray by the gate and hurried to the house. Wrong move, it turned out. As soon as I closed the door to the vestibule a hand covered my mouth and nose with a stinking cloth. I was yanked backwards into a fleshy body that soon seemed to coat me completely. Vision darkened, and my head began to spin. I blacked out.
Chapter Fourteen
It took a few seconds until my sight cleared on a pair of legs and boots. Mine.
I lay crouched on the back seat of a car, the sound of the sea a muffled roar outside. A leathered hand held a small bottle that looked like cologne at my nose, but stunk pungently of sulfur.
As I recognized Officer Sorescu in the driver’s seat, I panicked and scrambled to sit up. My eyes must’ve spoken volumes, since he hurried to explain himself.
“Don’t worry,” he said, palm up as if to stop me from screaming. “I mean no harm. Agent Varlam wants to see you.”
The slightly anxious tone and soft brown eyes confirmed that he posed no danger. This situation wasn’t any more pleasant to him than it was to me. Fear subsided.
Rubbing the back of my neck I said, “What the hell did you do that for?”
He looked down, mien guilty. “It wasn’t my call, Miss Preda.”
“Hector’s call, then?”
But he wouldn’t lose a word on it. He helped me out of the car into the roar outside, and kept me in balance as I stepped on the brink of an earth cliff above the raging sea. My hair whipped against my face in the wind, the cold infiltrating through the loops of my knit and biting me all over. Grains of sand and hair stuck to my lips.
That Hector wanted to talk at the sea front in such weather struck me as weird at the very least. For all I knew, Hector Varlam could be as dangerous as any thug. I didn’t trust him, he wore too many masks, and something told me he was using Leona. He messed with her mind and exploited her vulnerabilities.
I braced myself in a futile attempt to keep some of my body heat that quickly lost the battle with shivering when Sorescu put an arm around my back. It helped, warmth spreading along my spine as I managed my first wobbly steps through the frosted shrubbery towards the front line of apartment buildings, spotted with lights at scattered windows. As we walked, the man brought his body closer, and I gave in to his warming arms. His presence felt somehow reassuring, but then Damian’s warning flashed through my mind. I loosened myself gently from his embrace, as if Damian could pop out of nowhere any second, and punch the man senseless.
As we reached the entrance to a tower-shaped block of flats close to the cliff, my heart raced like a rabbit’s. The place looked sinister, doors and railings creaking in its hollow, obscure heights. Elevator broken, which was a tragedy considering the ten stories we had to climb. They seemed deserted.
We reached the highest floor panting. There were no apartments here, only a set of double doors cast into the long wall, apparently made of steel. They were closed, massive and forbidding, like the entrance to a vault.
“What is this?” I asked Sorescu, puzzled.
Sorescu didn’t reply. He just pushed a button embedded in a metal panel that looked like a high-tech interphone, much resembling the one at Dad’s lab. The heavy steel withdrew sideward into the wall with a high-tech sound worthy of starship Enterprise, making my jaw drop. A freaking penthouse bunker in what looked like a ghost block in Chernobyl?
A disappointment to see we now stood before a spacious room with floor-to-ceiling windows across from us. It seemed they hadn’t been washed in months, but they were surprisingly well insulated, the roar of the sea barely audible. Only our steps reverberated across
the bare-walled space, the concrete smeared with what looked like rudimentary graffiti and cusses written in coal, resembling the ashen skin of a heavy smoker covered with tattoos.
Hector Varlam looked out one of the dirty panes of glass. He stood with hands in his pockets, a thick coat covering him to the knees, the collar straight up, concealing his nape. He seemed a cold war, James Bond character.
The door behind us slid shut with a thud – incredible, all the technology deployed only to hide an empty room in dire need of renovation – and Agent Varlam turned around to face us. A surprise to see he’d shaved, revealing olive skin with vestigial craters – maybe from chicken pox? His aquiline features were even more pronounced without the beard, expressing cunning, and the dark eyes focused, his hair slicked back.
He wasn’t close to Damian’s league, but he was a good-looking man nevertheless. Robust and masculine. I imagined a hairy, nicely formed chest and rough hands that would make Leona’s body vibrate.
“He meant every word,” Hector said, his voice an echo in the hollow space.
“What?”
“Novac. What he told you about his feelings at the café, he meant it. It wasn’t just a point he made about your ‘susceptibility to lies of passion,’ as you told Miss Ignat. He really is strongly attracted to you. Miss Ignat told me all about your evening with him, I hope you don’t mind.”
“I do mind, as a matter of fact.”
“Don’t be mad at her, all she means to do is to protect you. With someone like Damian Novac on your case, a killer with a sick crush, you could use the protection.”
“Oh, I believe you, but I have a hard time trusting you.”
“And why is that?”
“You threatened to lock me up, along with my dad, remember?”
“You have me all wrong. I assure you that was not my intention.”
“Are we playing games now, Hector? Are we going to pretend that we didn’t share that train carriage? The cottage? The cold? The dread? That you didn’t speak those words at the hospital?”
“It’s not like we shared all that as best friends, is it? Our exchanges were few, so you can’t claim to know me as well as a friend.”
“Back at the hospital you would’ve had me believe so to get info out of me. And, truth is, we did go through things that would create a bond between even the most distant of people. Our lives were threatened in the same place, in the same way. So. What happened to babe?”
He smirked. “Don’t tell me you’d like me to call you that again?”
“I’d like to keep our relationship authentic, if we’re forced to have one at all.”
He nodded, inspecting my face. “I knew it had to be more than looks that got Damian Novac hooked.” Then, addressing Sorescu, “Leave us.”
The man turned and walked away, but lingered by the door, his fingers missing the code on the panel several times. A low cuss.
Hector gave him the combination. The metal doors thudded shut behind Sorescu, and Hector and I were left alone, facing each other.
“You must make him nervous, poor Sorescu,” Hector said.
“I think you intimidate him.”
“Never enough to make him lose his focus. He might not be the brightest, but he’s a well-trained man.”
“Then I must make him nervous indeed,” I replied in the most defiant tone I could, chin up. “And I’m certain you know it was BioDhrome’s gas that brought about this . . . attractiveness. It made my brain activate it. As you know I didn’t always possess it.”
“Oh, you were always an attractive girl. It’s just that you looked so . . . fresh, most men thought you were still underage. Your fellow students are too young to appreciate the type. They’re intrigued by the mature, well versed women. But Novac saw the goddess in you from the beginning.” He turned around and walked along the windows.
“He watched you on campus. You were the only woman to have ever caught his attention, actually, as strange as that sounds. At first I accredited his interest to the fact that you were Preda’s daughter – since it had been Dr. Preda who’d infiltrated him on campus with the mission of protecting you in the first place – but it soon became obvious that he found pleasure in the sight of you. Especially after that night at the dorms, when you spent half an hour together in the bathroom. Which was very inconsiderate, by the way. Yes, I was there, too, observing. Since that night something changed in Novac’s entire body language. His eyes glinted in a special way as he glanced around for you, and his interest grew by the day. It was a shock even to me. In six years I’d never seen a spark in those dead eyes of his. Well, except in the depths of his studies – the science of man fascinates him, as it does any psycho.”
He turned to me, dark eyes sharp as he marked the heavy. “Novac is a genetically engineered killing machine with little trace of humanity left, but somehow you managed to reawaken the man in him.”
My heart jumped. Hector grinned.
“I didn’t say anything at the hospital because I wasn’t sure,” he said. “But now I have no doubt. After that night at the party, Novac finally began acting like a man and not a thing immune to all cravings like a Terminator. After he met you I could read feeling in his face, in his moves, in every twitch of his facial muscles. Back in the mountains it was obvious that wanted to rip your clothes off.”
I looked away from him, out the window to my own reflection. The fuzzy face was flushed, chest rising and falling fast as I breathed. The scenario Hector’s words put in my head . . . Damian between my legs, moaning and slamming into me, hands clenched on the edge of the bunk above my head, veins showing between his arm muscles.
“Damian’s shrewd,” I said, making an effort to control my breathing and my voice. “Calculated. Maybe this is a strategy of his to manipulate me more easily.”
“I’m absolutely positive this isn’t the case. But you can and must use his feelings to manipulate him.”
Hector and I looked at each other at the same time, and I knew this was it. This was the point where he’d tell me why I was here.
“Alice, the R.I.S. desperately needs your cooperation. Lives depend on you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Damian Novac is an engineered killer with friends in high places, and he’s planning a bloodbath. Our only chance to stop it is to use his only weakness against him – to use you.”
I clenched my jaw, my eyes burning with the need to slap him. “This is outrageous! You’re a freaking trained R.I.S. agent, you have the entire Intelligence Service and the entire police force at your disposal, and you’re putting this on my shoulders?”
“Listen, Alice. Novac is an extremely dangerous creature, and he’s got the support of entities so powerful you can’t begin to imagine. None of my agents can get anywhere near him, no one can. The only one who can is you. You he welcomes in his proximity, he seeks your closeness. He stalks your house, and he’s got someone there whenever business keeps him away. That’s why Officer Sorescu had to create the illusion that you were safe in your home this evening, knock you out with chloroform – I know, old school, but still highly efficient – and sneak out through the back door after the rest of my men baited Novac’s minions away.”
Blood thumped in my ears. Damian is stalking me. Hector came really close, clasping my shoulders.
“Alice, listen.” He took a deep breath, his gaze darkening and locking on mine. “The Executioner is planning a bloodbath at the Marquette on Saturday night.”
I threw my head back, squinting at Hector as if that could help make sense of what he was saying.
“BioDhrome holds a nucleus meeting with their most important members once every ten years,” he continued, “and Saturday is when the next grand event takes place. A chance the Executioner and the Order of Lords have been waiting for since forever, and a chance they’ll take to wipe them all out. Novac will order the doors closed at midnight, and he and his minions will massacre everybody at the club – including innocen
t people, since protocol says everybody might be working with BioDhrome.”
“But, if the R.I.S. knows . . . there must be some way for you to stop this!”
He shook his head. “The Order of Lords is much too powerful. The only person who can stop this is you – if you’re at the club on Saturday, Novac will desist. He’ll call off the operation.”
I refused to believe Damian capable of such a monstrous thing. “This can’t be. I can’t – Damian would never –”
“Don’t be a fool, Alice. With you, Novac is showing only his best side, but he is, in truth, a monster. I guarantee that you won’t be in the slightest danger if you help us. Novac would never hurt you or the people you care about, so Miss Ignat, George Voinescu, everybody who means something to you will never have anything to fear from him either. But don’t confront him about his plans for Saturday, because that would give him the chance to find a way and keep you from the whole thing. Innocent people will die, and no one will be able to stop it from happening. Your presence there must be a surprise to him. Saturday will be the only night he won’t have your house under surveillance because he needs all of his men at the Marquette, so you’ll be able to move as you please.”
The dying Wretch, blood gurgling out of his mouth, stabbed my brain. It’s happening again. “What do I have to do?”
“Make him jealous and get him out of there.”
Say what? I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Go to the club with a group of friends, flirt with one of the boys. It’ll get Novac to grab you and storm out, leaving his commando position. His minions won’t do anything unless ordered by him, so the whole thing will be disarmed. You could use that young man whom you were supposed to marry not long ago. Mr. Anghel. He follows you around like a slobbering dog lately. He’s moldable like clay in your hands.”