Experience a heart-pumping and thrilling tale of suspense!
Originally published in THRILLER (2006),
edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author James Patterson.
In this Thriller Short, #1 New York Times bestselling author Eric Van Lustbader examines the emotional side of life as a spy.
Max Brandt is an intelligence operative, and he’s good at what he does. But he loses the will to live after the death of his wife, so he joins the Agency. His first assignment places him in immediate danger, but due to his grief, Max welcomes the end. Yet he fails to comprehend the toll secrecy and lies can take. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live as an outsider, this story is for you.
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The Other Side of the Mirror
Eric Van Lustbader
CONTENTS
The Other Side of the Mirror
ERIC VAN LUSTBADER
When Eric Van Lustbader was asked by the estate of the late Robert Ludlum to continue Ludlum’s series of thrillers featuring Jason Bourne, he told them he wanted free rein to take the character in new directions. At the time, Lustbader was grappling with the loss of his father. So, understandably, the basis of The Bourne Legacy revolved around the thorny relationship between Bourne and the son he’d for many years assumed to be dead.
Similarly, in Lustbader’s latest novel, The Bravo Testament, a father-son relationship fuels the high-powered action and emotional responses of the main characters. This familial emotional resonance will be familiar to Lustbader’s fans, as it stretches all the way back to his first thriller, The Ninja.
The Other Side of the Mirror deepens and broadens this theme, but in other ways it’s a departure for Lustbader. He wrote the story after one day rediscovering The Outsider, by philosopher/novelist Colin Wilson, in his library. The Outsider had been a seminal book, one Lustbader had devoured during his college days. Reading it again he found new meaning in his own work, which is reflected in The Other Side of the Mirror, a story about a spy—an outsider, if ever there was one—and the terrible toll secrecy and lies take on him. Lustbader, who thinks of himself as an outsider, seems drawn to his sense of apartness. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be outside society, or if that’s precisely how you feel, this story is for you.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR
He awakens into darkness, the darkness at the dead of night—but it is also the dread darkness of the soul that has plagued him for thirteen weeks, thirteen months, it’s impossible now to say.
What he can say for certain is that he has been on the run for thirteen weeks, but his assignment had begun thirteen months ago. He joined the Agency, propelled not so much by patriotism or an overweening itch to rub shoulders with danger—the two main motivations of his compatriots—but by the death of his wife. Immediately upon her death he had felt an overwhelming urge to hurl himself into the dark and, at times, seedy labyrinth in which she had dwelled for a decade before he had discovered that she did not go off to work in the manner of other people.
And now, here he is, twenty-three years after they had taken their vows, sitting in the dark, waiting for death to come.
* * *
It is hot in the room what with all the piles of magazines he’s amassed, ragged and torn, beautiful as pink-cheeked children. Joints cracking, he rises, pads over to the air conditioner, moving like a wader through surf of his own making. It wheezes pathetically when he turns it on, which isn’t all that surprising since even five minutes later nothing but hot air emerges from its filthy grille. Not that Buenos Aires is a Third World city, far from it. There are plenty of posh hotels whose rooms are at this moment bathed in cool, dry air, but this isn’t one of them. It has a name, this hotel, but he’s already forgotten it.
In the tiny bathroom, full of drips and creeping water bugs the size of his thumb, he splashes lukewarm water on his face. Cold is hot and hot is cold; does anything work right in this hellhole? He wants to take a shower, but the bottom is filled with more magazines, stacked like little castles in the sand. They comfort him, somehow, these magazine constructs, and he turns away, a sudden realization taking hold.
Curiously, it is in this hellhole that he feels most comfortable. Over the last thirteen weeks he has been in countless hotels in countless cities on three continents—this is his third, after North America and Europe. The difference, besides going from winter to summer, is this: here in this miserable, crumbling back alley of Buenos Aires, death breathes just around the corner. It has been relentlessly stalking him for thirteen weeks, and now it is closer than it has ever been, so close the stench of it is horrific, like the reek of a rabid dog or an old man with crumbling teeth.
The closer death comes, the calmer he becomes, that’s the irony of his situation. Though, as he stares at his pallid face with its sunken eyes and raw cheekbones, he acknowledges that it very well may not be the situation at all.
He stares for a moment at the pad of his forefinger. On it is imprinted part of a familiar photograph—from one of the magazine pages, or from his life? He shrugs, uses the forefinger to pull down his lower lids one at a time. His eyes look like pebbles, black and perfectly opaque, as if there is no light, no spark, no intelligence behind them. He is—who is he today? Max Brandt, the same as he was yesterday and the day before that. Max Brandt, Essen businessman, may have checked into this dump, but it was Harold Moss, recently divorced tourist, who had come through security at Ezeiza International Airport. Moss and Brandt don’t look much alike, one is stoop-shouldered with slightly buck teeth and a facile grin, the other stands ramrod straight and strides down the street with confidence and a certain joie de vivre. Gait is more important than the face in these matters. Faces tend to blur in people’s memories, but the manner in which someone walks remains.
He stares at himself and feels as if he is looking at a painting or a mannequin. He is Harold Moss and Max Brandt, their skins are wrapped around him, in him, through him, helping to obliterate whatever was there before he had conjured them up. His facade, his exoskeleton, his armor is complete. He is no one, nothing, less—far less—than a cipher. No one glancing at him on the street could possibly guess that he is a clandestine ag
ent—save for the enemy against whom he has labored tirelessly and assiduously for thirteen years, and possibly longer, the enemy who is no longer fooled by his periodic shedding of one persona for another, expert though it is, the enemy who is now curled on his doorstep, having finally run him to ground.
He returns to the rumpled bed, flicking off more water bugs. They like to gather in the warm indentations his body makes, no doubt feeding on the microscopic flaking of skin he leaves behind in sleep, like fevered nightmares sloughed off by the unconscious mind. He moves the bugs out of necessity only; really he has no innate quarrel with them the way most people do. Live and let live is his motto.
His harsh laugh sends them scattering to the four shadowed corners of the room. Some disappear behind the closed wooden jalousie that covers the window. They have all too quickly come to know him, and they have no desire to be eaten alive. Flopping down on the thin mattress in a star position, he gazes up at the constellations of cracks in the plaster ceiling that at one time long ago must have been painted blue. They seem to change position every time he takes this survey, but he knows this cannot be true.
I know, I know… A singsong lullaby to himself. What do I know? Something, anything, who can say with the fissures appearing inside his head?
* * *
It never fails, the color blue makes him think of Lily. The azure sky under which they picnicked when they were dating, the aquamarine-and-white surf through which he swam, following her out to the deep water. There were bluebirds in the old sycamore that dominated the front yard of their house in Maryland, and there was a time, early on in their marriage, when Lily cultivated bluebells in her spare moments. She liked to wear blue, as well—powder-blue sleeveless blouses in summer, navy cardigans in autumn, cobalt parkas in winter, denim work shirts in the spring, with the sleeves half-rolled revealing, after snows and cruel biting winds, the beautiful bare flesh of her forearms.
Lily with her hard, lean body and bright cornflower-blue eyes. She rode horses like a man but made love like a woman. In the privacy of their bedroom, she was soft, her voice gooey enough to get him to do anything gladly. He was the only one to see this side of her—not even their son, Christopher, had an inkling. He was acutely, almost painfully aware of the nature of her gift to him, but then his love for her ran so deep and strong that the first moment he had seen her take the stage for an audition at college he had been struck by a bolt of physical pain that had nearly felled him.
He was in the theater arts program then, learning the ins and outs of makeup design. Within a week, he would be painting her face for the stage, making her look older so that she could better fit the role she had won at the audition. She was a fine actress, even then, raw and untrained, for she had been born with the mind and the heart to recite lines as if they were her own thoughts and feelings.
He loved his work. The characters he created were for him more real than the actors themselves, whom he found vain and boring. When he was required to simulate blood or wounds he found novel ways of execution, for he dreamed of the violence that had caused these traumas, lived it, imagined it in such vivid detail that he never failed to win accolades from the faculty directors who over the four years came and went like clockwork.
Applying makeup to Lily was akin to making love to her. He felt strongly that he was transforming her not only outside but inside as well. She was, through him, becoming another person, an unknown quantity. At those times he felt a peculiar form of intimacy that was transcendent. He felt as if he was killing her, only to have her splendidly resurrected when she made her appearance on stage.
At first, she hadn’t seemed interested in him, or at least she had contrived to remain aloof. That was her reputation, he had learned. More than one of his friends and acquaintances had counseled him to steer clear of her. Perversely, their warnings had only served to make him want her more. Desire was like a flood-tide inside him, threatening to sweep him away.
“You want me, you may think you want me,” she had said to him in those early days, “but I know what you want.”
She had startled him, but like everything she said or did, hidden inside the shock of her words was the truth: she had been interested enough in him to do the research. She did not strike him as the kind of person to waste her time on things that didn’t matter to her. He was right. Six months after graduation they were engaged.
By that time, he had switched from makeup to set design, wanting to re-create reality in the largest sense possible. He had become bored by the tiny tasks involved in remaking faces. He required a bigger canvas for his imagination. In his widely hailed designs could be detected not only symbols from the playwrights’ work, but for every major character. It was as if he had imagined each character, carefully hiding the most potent part of him somewhere in plain sight.
A year after that, they had a June wedding. It was beautiful—or, rather, Lily was beautiful in her shimmering satin gown with ephemeral tulle sleeves. There was, however, a flaw that marred the perfection. During the reception, he had gone to relieve himself and, upon returning, had seen Lily in close conversation with his cousin, Will. What enraged him beyond all reason was Will’s hand rested on Lily’s bare forearm. The white tulle of her sleeve had been drawn back like the intimate curtain in a boudoir, revealing that which should not be caressed by any outsider. It was unthinkable.
It took the best man and three of the ushers to wrench him off his cousin, whose face was by then a bloody pulp. Will couldn’t even stand on his own, a fact that created a fierce elation in him as he was bound backward across the dance floor.
The band had been playing “We Are Family,” and now they resumed, the first several bars as shaky as Will.
* * *
He stands spread-legged in front of the laboring air conditioner, which he is quite certain has had no Freon in it for years. At least the air, hot as it is, is moving. Lurid neon colors seep through the blades of the jalousie despite his best efforts to smother the outside world. There is a pool in the concrete courtyard below, or at any rate he thinks there is, remembering a blue-black oval he passed upon his arrival several days—or is it weeks?—ago. He could, he thinks, go down to the courtyard and fling his sweating body into the water. But perhaps that, too, is lukewarm like the water out of the faucet and he would sweat all the more with his exertions. In any case, he knows he will not take the chance. He is in his bunker now, the final resting place from which he has challenged his enemies to take him feetfirst.
* * *
Christopher was born six months after the wedding, but he wasn’t a preemie. No, his birth was dead on time. He was a handsome child, with none of the gnomelike qualities many newborns exhibit. He had hair as blond as his mother’s and her pink appleblossom cheeks, but he had his father’s musculature and sturdy build and, over the years, would grow into a larger, handsomer version of the man who had made him.
That is how he has always thought of himself in relation to his son, as if Lily was a mere receptacle for his seed, as if her genes had played no role in Christopher’s physical or emotional makeup. Jesus, he hopes that is so.
And yet…He thinks of the day when Christopher found one of his early stage sets—a marvelous one-eighth size of colored cardboard, bits of wood and metal he’d done for the last act of Death of a Salesman. Christopher was—let’s see—ten or eleven. The boy had plucked his old dog-eared copy off the shelf in his den-studio and had called his parents in to witness his performance. He’d played the part of Biff and he wasn’t half-bad. Lily had encouraged him, of course, and for a while he’d taken acting lessons just as she had. But even then Christopher thought for himself. The chaos of acting, the publicness of performance proved too stressful. It was computers that fascinated him; he loved their precision and logic. For his first real project, he created software to change stage sets so that his father could fashion ever more intricate and complicated interiors and exteriors, cleverly mimicking reality in ways never before possible.
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It was little wonder that this project—an artistic triumph, though with limited commercial value—led to a closeness with his son he could never have imagined. It was also the reason, he was convinced, that Christopher confided in him, rather than in the male companions his own age.
“They don’t understand me, they don’t have a clue as to who I am,” Christopher told him one day.
And on others, during long walks, he confessed to his father his various love affairs. “They’re all doomed, from the start,” he said, “because even when I’m with them I can see how it’s going to end, and this throws me into an agony of despair.”
“Then, why don’t you stop?” he had said.
“Because I can’t,” Christopher replied. “The first blush is transporting, there’s no other feeling like it in the world.”
He had been startled to discover that Christopher kept tokens of all his affairs—locks of hair, a few beads, an anklet, even the crushed butt of a cigarette on which was imprinted in pink the lips of his former beloved. He accepted this fetishism because he understood it, deeply and completely, but of course he never told Lily.
And then there was the time when he’d found Christopher standing at the open window of his room. It was in the dead of night, when the world was quiet and far away.
“What are you doing?” he asked his son.
“I’m imagining what it would be like to jump.”
“Jump?” he had said, not quite understanding yet.
“Killing myself, Dad.”
He had come to stand by his son’s side. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Why do you think?”
Once again, he wasn’t alarmed; once again, he understood. He also felt out of sync with the world, estranged and a stranger, sometimes even to himself.
He’d put his hand on Christopher’s shoulder and felt as if it were his own shoulder. “Don’t concern yourself, son. Everything changes.”
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