The Joshua Stone

by James Barney

  “How ya doin’,” she called out as he entered.

  The man mumbled something unintelligible and headed back into the aisles. Tawnya watched him carefully in the convex security mirror in the far corner of the store as he moved slowly from aisle to aisle, picking up various items and cradling them in one arm. He spent nearly five minutes at the magazine rack in the back, where he seemed mesmerized by the magazine covers and newspapers. Finally, he brought his armful of items to the counter and dropped them in front of Tawnya.

  Tawnya tried not to look at the man’s face at all. She was used to dealing with toothless locals, stoned kids, grizzled truckers, and even actual homeless people, but this guy was different. His face and hands were . . . filthy. His long gray hair and beard were unruly and clumped together with mud in places. And those nails . . . my God. As quickly as she could, Tawnya rang up his purchases: fingernail clippers; scissors; shaving cream; disposable razors; a toothbrush; toothpaste; two ham-and-cheese sandwiches; a bottle of water; Time, U.S. News & World Report, and USA Today. “Is that all?” she asked.

  “Do you have cigarettes?” asked the man in an educated Northeastern accent.

  Tawnya was taken aback by his spoken words, which did not match his appearance at all. He sounded . . . smart. Which would explain all the newsmagazines, she figured. “Yeah, they’re back here. What kind you want?”

  “Chesterfields.”

  “Chesterfields?” Tawnya searched in vain for a few seconds. “Uh, we ain’t got those.”

  “Camels, then,” said the man.

  Tawnya rang up the cigarettes and reported the total: “Fifty-eight thirty-five.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Fifty-eight dollars and thirty-five cents,” Tawnya repeated slowly.

  The man seemed confused by that total but quickly retrieved two fifty-dollar bills from his pocket and handed them to her. Tawnya decided to skip the step of holding them up to the light, as all Stop & Shop employees were trained to do for bills over ten dollars. She wanted this guy gone and didn’t care if she had to take a couple of bogus bills to do it. She quickly made change and placed it on the counter in front of the man, opting not to put it in his hand as she would normally do. I ain’t touching those fingernails, she thought.

  The man scooped up the change and grabbed the two plastic shopping bags that Tawnya had filled with his purchases. “Thanks,” he said.

  Tawnya watched as the man exited the store and got back into his blue sedan. He sat there for several minutes in the bright light of the storefront, flipping through the newsmagazines with tremendous interest. Strange old guy, Tawnya thought, desperately wishing he would leave. Finally, to her great relief, the blue sedan pulled slowly out of the parking lot and turned left onto the access road leading to the highway. Tawnya noticed that the driver’s-side window was broken, although she didn’t think much of it. She saw all sorts of beat-up cars around here, and a broken window wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary. Besides, she was just glad the guy was gone. A quiet night in the store didn’t seem so bad after all, she decided.

  What Tawnya did not notice was that the man had merely pulled into the motel parking lot next door.

  Malachi closed and locked the door to room 132 of the Huntsman Motel and headed straight to the bathroom. He flipped on the light and gazed in amazement at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He shook his head slowly in disbelief as he touched his gray hair and beard and gently traced the fine wrinkles around his eyes. Although he could see his reflection clearly, he simply could not fathom that the man staring back at him . . . was him.

  Fingernails first, he decided. He glanced down and noticed that they’d finally stopped growing at their previously inexplicable rate. Whatever process had been taking place in his body for the past twenty-four hours seemed to be finally coming to an end. He unwrapped the clippers he’d bought and quickly went about grooming his fingernails and toenails to a respectable length. Then, unwrapping the scissors he’d purchased, he went to work on his hair. First, he clipped his beard and mustache short and shaved the remaining whiskers with a disposable razor. Then he did the best he could with his wild mane of gray hair, cutting it close to the scalp until it passably resembled a buzz cut. This process took the better part of an hour.

  Finally, with the grooming process complete, he washed his face and hands thoroughly with soap and water and dried off with a clean towel. With his face now clean shaven and his hair reasonably groomed, he gazed once more upon his reflection in the mirror. He certainly looked different. His skin was pallid and wrinkled, his cheeks sunken, his eyes dull and tired. Yet, with his facial hair gone and his hair cropped short, he could finally see himself in the middle-aged face staring back at him. Same eyes. Same nose. Same mouth. But so many wrinkles . . .

  Malachi removed his shirt and flexed his muscles in the mirror. The skin on his chest and arms was a bit baggy, but his muscle tone underneath was essentially the same as he remembered. And this was the strangest thing of all—he didn’t feel like he looked. The man in the mirror looked old and weathered, but, inside, Malachi felt strong and energized. He moved his body all around the bathroom, watching his reflection in the mirror to prove this to himself. He marched in place for several seconds, lifting each knee high above his waist. Then he twisted his torso all around with his hands on his hips. Finally, he did twenty jumping jacks in rapid succession. His movements during all of these exercises were confident and strong, which was precisely how he felt.

  All of this was beyond Malachi’s comprehension. Indeed, there were so many things he did not understand about his situation that he’d already begun flirting with a terrifying self-diagnosis: schizophrenia.

  All the while, new memories continued trickling into his mind, arriving in sporadic bursts with no logical connection or context. Often, these memories consisted of just a single word or phrase, or a brief recollection of some isolated event. At the moment, he was recalling a beautiful woman with black hair and a long white dress. Then the memory vanished, replaced with a darker memory of some undefined fear . . . and betrayal. He seized upon that last thought—trying once again to conjure up the memory of the gunshots. But, as before, his memory of that event consisted of only disconnected impressions. Surprise. Anger. Blood. And his escape into the darkness.

  An idea suddenly popped into his mind. Scanning the motel room, he quickly spotted a pen and a small pad of paper near the phone on the nightstand. He needed to start writing these things down. Logic would eventually help him piece it all together.

  He began by jotting down the single word that had just flashed into his mind at that very moment: “Jasher.”

  11

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Have you gotten any sleep?” asked Dr. Bill McCreary as he entered the small workroom.

  “Not really,” replied Califano. He was still seated in front of the computer monitor where he’d been all night, fingers tapping furiously at the keyboard. It was 4:12 A.M.

  “That’s what I figured.” McCreary approached and placed a mug of fresh coffee on the desk in front of Califano. “Here, I thought you might need this.” The mug was emblazoned with the official CIA seal: the head of a bald eagle above an argent shield inscribed with a sixteen-point compass rose. The compass rose represented the agency’s endless quest for information; the shield represented defense. Information as defense.

  Califano took a sip—black and unsweetened, just the way he liked it. “Thanks.”

  “So, whatcha got?”

  Califano resumed typing as he talked. “As you know, my program crawls the entire worldwide digisphere looking for relational hits. Everything from credit card transactions, travel reservations, online searches, news stories, blogs, e-mails, police reports, SEC filings, you name it. The more data you feed it, the better it gets at finding statistically significant relationships between what I call ‘independent informational entities’ or IIEs.”

  “Right,” said McC
reary. He sipped from his own mug as he watched Califano expertly navigating screen after screen of complex statistical data. The master at work.

  Califano continued. “I’ve been feeding it raw data all night, but it wasn’t until a couple of hours ago that it started kicking back good hits.” He performed a final, exaggerated keystroke and sat back as the screen suddenly changed to a colorful graph of squiggly lines and corresponding color-coded labels. The lines changed shape every few seconds as the program continuously updated the underlying statistical information. The result looked like a wriggling tangle of multicolored spaghetti.

  McCreary understood it, though. He leaned forward, acutely interested in what he was seeing.

  “Each of these lines,” said Califano, “represents a time-based statistical quantification of the relationship between two IIEs. It could be the relationship between a person and a particular place, for instance. Or between a particular place and a specific date. Or it could be the relationship between two people. Or anything else under the sun. You get the picture, right?”

  McCreary nodded.

  “Now obviously there are an infinite number of IIEs in the world and an infinite number of relationships among them. But we’re only interested in those relationships that have a strong statistical correlation to the data that we’ve fed the system, right?”

  “Sure. Our program works the same way,” said McCreary.

  Of course it does. “Now, what you’re seeing here,” Califano said, pointing to the screen, “are several dozen IIE relationships that have a statistically significant correlation to the data set I’ve provided, which includes everything from Dr. Holzberg’s hat size and preferred brand of underwear to the geographic coordinates of Thurmond and Fire Creek, and everything in between.”

  “So, what are these relationships?” asked McCreary, anxious to get to the point.

  “I’ll get to that in a second. A more interesting question is when are these relationships?” Califano tapped a few keys, and the graph on the screen suddenly changed scale. “Check this out. I did a retroactive analysis to see what these same relationships looked like for the past six months. See that?” He pointed with his index finger to a slow ramp up and then a sudden spike that occurred in the middle of the graph, about three months before, followed by another spike near the end of the graph. “That second spike was yesterday morning. Just about the time our friend Holzberg wandered into the diner in Fire Creek.”

  “What the—” McCreary straightened his posture, and an expression of concern suddenly flashed across his face. “But those could be our activities, right?”

  “Nope. I already filtered those out. These relationships are all independent of our activities.” Califano tapped a few more keys on the keyboard and brought up another screen on the monitor. “Now, to answer your previous question, here are the independent relationships whose relevancy scores suddenly hit the roof yesterday morning. This screen shows the first five in order of relevance.”

  McCreary leaned forward and began reading the list to himself. “What the hell?” he whispered.

  No.

  IIE1

  IIE2

  1

  Vladamir Krupnov

  Krupnov Energy, ZAO

  2

  Vladamir Krupnov

  Severodvinsk, Russia

  3

  Vladamir Krupnov

  Skolkovo Innovation Center

  4

  Vladamir Krupnov

  Arkhangelsk, Russia

  5

  Arkhangelsk, Russia

  Stephen Haroldson

  McCreary appeared stunned. “You sure about this?”

  “I’m positive. The relevancy scores for these relationships tower far above the noise and are actually on par with the relevancy scores of our own activities. In other words, either these guys in Russia know everything we know . . . or some weird shit is happening over there, too.”

  “Jesus,” said McCreary, shaking his head. “Who are these people?”

  Califano rolled his chair to the other side of the room and grabbed a stack of about twenty pages off the ink-jet printer. “Here, I prepared a report for you.”

  McCreary took the stack of papers and gave Califano a look that showed he was impressed.

  “Vladamir Krupnov is a Russian businessman with ties to the Russian government and the Russian mob.”

  “Kind of the same thing these days, isn’t it?” said McCreary.

  “Uh-huh. He made a ton of money a few years ago brokering natural gas rights in Siberia to European venture funds. Of course, you can’t do something like that in Russia unless you have close ties to the Russian government, which he does. He was the director of the Skolkovo Innovation Center for several years, which the Russian government has been trying to develop for years into a Russian Silicon Valley.”

  “And Krupnov Energy is his company?”

  “Yep. It appears to be a start-up company, although there’s not much info about it. No website, no press releases, or anything like that. I did find a registration with the Russian Federal Tax Service about a year ago for Krupnov’s ‘ZAO’ status—the Russian equivalent of an LLC.”

  “Any indication of what type of energy they’re involved in?”

  “From the looks of things, nuclear. But that’s just a guess.”

  “And what about Stephen Haroldson?”

  “Yeah, that’s an odd one. As far as I can tell, he works for the British Civil Service, some sort of assistant manager in the Department of Work and Pension. Lives with his wife in a small row house in northwest London. He’s booked travel to Arkhangelsk, which is what landed him on this list. But I’m not sure what his relationship is with Krupnov, if any. I’ll keep looking, though.”

  McCreary dragged his hand over his face. “Christ,” he mumbled. “The Russians. I’m gonna have to get the director involved.” After that, he was quiet for a very long time.

  Califano finally broke the silence. “Hey, Doc, something else just popped up.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Take a look.” Califano rolled his chair out of the way to make room for McCreary.

  McCreary stepped forward and quickly read the document on the screen. It appeared to be an excerpt from a police log, documenting a radio broadcast sent by a West Virginia state trooper last night. Two of Califano’s relevancy terms were highlighted in bold type.

  Broadcast Time: 2134

  Responding Unit(s): 312

  Event: Carjacking (Code 215)

  Occurred: 40 minutes ago

  Location: State Road 15, approx. 2 miles east of Beury Mtn. Rd.

  Direction: Suspect fled east on State Road 15

  Suspect(s): Caucasian male, 55–65 years old, long gray hair, full beard (gray), long fingernails, black leather coat

  Weapon: Heavy object

  Property Stolen: 2010 Chevy Impala 4dr sedan, dark blue. Tag no.: WV/YHD–522

  Ambulance requested

  EOT

  “What do you think?” asked Califano.

  McCreary shrugged. “What, just because he had long hair and fingernails?”

  “No, man. Look at the location. Route 15 and Beury Mountain Road. That’s less than ten miles from the Thurmond lab.”

  McCreary stared at the screen for several seconds, rubbing his temples. It was almost as if he didn’t want to see the connection.

  Califano interrupted his concentration. “Hey, you can think what you want. But it looks to me like we’ve got another crazy Santa Claus out there with long fingernails . . . and a car.”

  “Shit,” McCreary muttered. “Where’s Ana?”

  “I’m right here,” said Ana Thorne, entering the room at that moment. She was still in her yoga pants and sweatshirt. Her hair was in disarray from sleeping on a cot. “What’s going on?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.

  “Michael can fill you in. There are recent events in Russia that look very concerning. And we may have another boomerang from Thurmond out there. He’s m
obile . . . and potentially violent. We need to bring him in right away. Understand?”

  “Uh, sure,” said Thorne stoically. “But what events in Russia? I haven’t seen—”

  McCreary cut her off. “Michael will fill you in.” He turned to Califano. “Michael, call Admiral Armstrong and ask him to meet us before our flight this morning. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “Will do,” said Califano. He was still puzzling over the odd word McCreary had used to describe the carjacker: a “boomerang.”

  “Meanwhile,” said McCreary glumly, “I’ve got to go brief the director about all of this. And I’m sure he won’t be pleased.” He opened the door to leave but stopped short. “Oh, and, Michael . . .”

  “Hmm?”

  “Good job with this.” McCreary held up the twenty-page report. “Please give copies to Ana and Admiral Armstrong.” He turned and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Ana was still standing in the middle of the room with messy hair and sleepy eyes. She gawked incredulously at Califano. “I lie down for three hours . . .”

  Califano shrugged. “What can I say? Things move fast around here.”

  12

  ARKHANGELSK, RUSSIA

  Gentlemen, welcome,” said Vladamir Krupnov to his two guests, who had just arrived at the Talagi Airport by way of Helsinki. “Welcome to Arkhangelsk, the city of angels.”

  Krupnov, fifty-one, was tall and trim. He had a weathered, almost leathery face, clean shaven and accentuated by graying hair, which was groomed in a military-style buzz cut. He wore a long black overcoat over a thick turtleneck sweater and black pants. “I hope your flight was not too uncomfortable,” he said. He removed one leather glove and extended his hand to the older of the two men, Benjamin Fulcher—the British expatriate who had once been known as Elijah among a certain elite group.

  “It was fine,” said Fulcher, accepting Krupnov’s handshake. He repositioned his walking cane and gestured toward the man next to him. “May I introduce Stephen Haroldson.”