The Shadow Walker

by William R Hunt

  Peter closed the door with a resounding and final clang.

  Victor glanced around the room once more. This time his eyes paused on a round stone urn resting on a pedestal. Delicate designs, impossible to distinguish from a distance, rose in relief around the urn like braille.

  Peter read his puzzled frown. “My father’s ashes,” he explained. He crossed the room and traced the side of the urn gently with his fingers. “He left my mother and me when I was very young. They had an argument about money—he was keeping most of it for himself, making plans to live with another woman. That was my mother’s side of the story, anyway.

  “I tracked him down later on, when I had the means to do so. He was a decrepit old man who had lost his hair, his teeth, and his dignity. He was living in a poor house. I kept an eye on him until he passed. It wasn’t long. After that, I paid to have his body cremated and brought the ashes here. It’s quite something, isn’t it? To think our bodies are composed of nothing more than ash?”

  “It’s beautiful,” Victor answered, not knowing what else to say. “The urn.”

  Peter nodded. “Roman. Cost me a fortune. But you only have one father, don’t you agree?”

  “Why did you bring me down here, Peter?”

  Peter raised a finger to stop him from saying more. “I was just getting to that.” He opened one of the desk drawers, leafed through a stack of newspapers, and withdrew an article. He handed it to Victor.

  “”Teenage Prodigy Revolutionizes Steel Industry,”” Victor read.

  “I had more hair then, but I think you’ll recognize me nonetheless.”

  Victor skimmed the article, reading about how a shy teenager who mostly kept to himself managed to double a factory’s productivity over the course of his first year and a half on the job.

  “The factory was a mess when I arrived there,” Peter explained modestly. “Most of the changes I implemented involved no more than putting the right people in the right positions.”

  “And getting others fired,” Victor added, still reading the article.

  Peter shrugged as if this was of little consequence.

  “But why did they listen to you?” Victor asked, looking up.

  Peter’s eyes gleamed with mischief. “I can be quite persuasive when I want to be, Victor. You should know that by now.”

  At Victor’s insistence, he followed that article up with several more newspapers highlighting Peter’s meteoric rise from entry-level laborer to supervisor before eventually becoming a member of the Board of Trustees. He was by no means wealthy at that time, but he used the money from his new pension to invest in businesses worldwide, all while renting a one-room basement with almost no furniture. Peter, however, showed no pride in his poverty, neither then nor now. Victor suspected some part of Peter would always despise where he had come from. Perhaps it reminded him too much of the man whose ashes rested in that urn.

  Nothing in the articles mentioned Vanessa Brunner, the wife Peter had lost to leukemia after only a few years of marriage. Victor suspected that some of the tabloids must have picked up the story of their marriage, and also Vanessa’s death, but it did not surprise him that Peter had not shown him those papers. Maybe Peter did not even keep copies of them. If only it was that easy to eliminate one’s memories, Victor thought.

  Thirty minutes later, they were drinking sherry and smoking Cubans while they lounged in a pair of stiff-backed chairs Peter had purchased in some auction or another for an egregious sum.

  “Would you believe you’re the first person to ever come in here, other than me?” Peter asked.

  Victor was watching his cloud of cigar smoke drift toward the ceiling. “Except for the people who built it, you mean.”

  “No,” Peter answered gravely. “I had them incinerated. There’s another urn beneath the desk.”

  Victor stared sidelong at Peter for a few seconds before he started laughing. It felt good to laugh like that, drinking sherry and smoking cigars in the vault of a castle in a strange country, with nobody for company except an eccentric genius who just might be a member of the Illuminati.

  “I don’t care what the commercials say,” Victor said. “In my book, you’re clearly The Most Interesting Man in the World.”

  Peter smiled politely but without warmth. “You think so?”

  “Are you kidding? I’d kill to be in your place and have all this.”

  “Who?”

  Victor’s smile began to slip away. “What?”

  “Who would you kill, Victor?” Peter’s eyes were as cold and gray as the wintry Atlantic. His cigar burned in one hand, unattended, a swallow of sherry forgotten in the other.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” Victor asked.

  “How long have you been here, and still you do not know me?”

  Victor felt a chill along his spine. The words sounded familiar, almost Biblical. He set his glass on the floor, no longer thirsty.

  “I’m joking!” Peter exclaimed, striking Victor’s shoulder with the back of the hand holding his cigar. Ash and cinders tumbled to the floor between their chairs. “What kind of a man do you think I am?”

  Then he leaned forward and regarded Victor earnestly. “But if you’re still interested in seeing that urn…”

  Victor shook his head. “So what happens next?”

  “Does that mean you’re back in?”

  Victor mulled this over, thinking how quickly he had changed his mind. But it was different now, wasn’t it? Someone - presumably Antoine Graves, the man Sophia claimed had been overseeing the development of the bee virus - had made an attempt on his life, and as far as he knew, he would never be safe until Graves was in the ground—no pun intended.

  He swallowed the last of his sherry. It went down cool and tingling and seemed to fill him with new strength. He knew Peter was waiting for a decision, and in that waiting Victor’s mind turned back to home: standing at the kitchen sink with Camila’s hands around his waist, watching friends and neighbors gossip and drink beer and wait for lunch, letting the day turn on its slow axis as if buried inside them was a secret knowledge that thousands or even millions of similar days would come and go, as if nothing could threaten the perfect harmony of their lives. But there was a threat, wasn’t there? Victor had found it, and like the Israelites listening to the taunts of Goliath, he could either duck his head and hope someone else stood in his place or he could shoulder the responsibility and step forward, taking his place as champion.

  Because, as Peter had said, that was what great men did: They shouldered responsibilities too heavy for others to bear.

  This isn’t easy, he wanted to say, but in the end it wasn’t supposed to be easy, was it? Shouldn’t the greatest rewards carry the greatest costs?

  He met Peter’s eyes. “I can’t hide my head in the sand, not after learning someone is trying to destroy our world. Count me in.”

  Peter gazed at him for a long time. “Alright, Victor. But no more second-guessing, no more doubts. This may be a bloody business, and it may be a long business, but in the end we will bring these people to justice. The world is depending on us, and if we doubt ourselves, we have failed already.” He took a long puff on his cigar and stared at the urn containing his father’s ashes.

  “So where do we begin?” Victor asked.

  Chapter 48

  He made three calls the next day.

  The first was a check-up call to Washburn, who was still in the hospital. He was in good spirits, though he had suffered a few bruises - in addition to the knife wound - when he tumbled down the concrete steps (”Maybe now Lynn will notice when I’m in the room,” he joked). He wanted to know what Victor was up to and when Victor would be back in the States. After giving some vague assurances about shooting hoops or meeting up at the firing range, Victor wished him a speedy recovery and hung up.

  The second was to Tecumseh, informing them he would be unable to take any contracts in the near future. He left the news with a secretary who was clipping her
nails, the silence punctuated by the sharp click of the clippers. He said his piece and got off before she could give him any grief.

  The third call was to Camila.

  “How long?” she asked, and there was a note in her voice he had never heard before, not when her car over-heated and left her stranded on the shoulder of Interstate 84 at 11 PM after a weekend visit to her folks in PA, not even when she learned there had been “complications” during her dad’s bypass surgery. It was two notes, really. The first was disappointment at the prospect of not seeing him for a while. The second was more subtle, a conviction that something had happened to him and he wasn’t talking about it.

  “A week or two, probably,” he answered on a long sigh, thinking it might be closer to a month or two but wanting to keep her optimistic. He did not feel guilty exactly. What troubled him was the sense that he was straining a trust that, like an elastic band, could only be stretched so far before it broke.

  “And it’s important?” she asked faintly. “You’re helping people?” She sounded like she was seeking reassurance that this was not just the calm before the storm, the timeout people sometimes took before they unburdened themselves of the weighty truths they had been keeping. Victor could only imagine the theories that might be spinning through her brain, most notably that he was staying at a resort with a mistress, an exotic dancer or an actress or just a pretty face who had been at the right place at the right time.

  “It’s very important,” he answered. “I can’t give details - I’m sorry - but this…this is the most important work I’ve ever done.” There was a stirring of laughter from the balcony. Victor was standing on the other side of the windows beside a desk with a telephone that looked old enough to be Alexander Graham Bell’s first, and he could see five men standing out there, smoking and talking shop and waiting for Victor to join them. It reminded him of a picture of his high school football team, their happy faces grinning at the camera as if someone had just told a terrific joke, their bodies relaxed with the calm assurance of those united in common purpose. He felt a faint, fluttering yearning to be out there, just another one of the boys.

  “Okay,” Camila answered, almost in a whisper. “Okay.” In the background, Victor could hear someone yell her name.

  “Who’s that?” Victor asked.

  “Sorry, I’m at work.”

  “I thought it was your lunch break?”

  “It is, but Tanya didn’t show up today and there’s a new line of baby clothes we need to get on the shelves, so…” She turned away from the phone and said something. There was a reply Victor could not quite hear, and then she was back on the line.

  “Sorry,” she said again. “It’s just kind of crazy here.”

  “Don’t let them push you around, okay?”

  “I won’t, Vic. I promise.” He heard a sad smile in her voice.

  They were both silent. He watched the men on the balcony, listening to Camila scrape a bowl clean and shift the phone from one ear to the other.

  “You can’t hear me chewing, can you?” she asked, her words muffled.

  “I can now,” he replied.

  She laughed. He grinned, wishing he could see the way her shoulders shook when she laughed. He thought of the distance between them, thousands of miles of mountains and fields and the cold gray Atlantic.

  “Listen,” he said, “I want you to promise me something.”

  “Is everything alright, babe? You sound worried.”

  “Just promise me that whatever happens…however long this takes…you’ll be waiting for me at the end.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I know it’s a lot to ask—” Victor began.

  “I promise,” she said. “I promise I’ll be here.”

  Victor sighed. “Thank you. I can’t tell you how much it means right now to hear that.”

  “I love you, Vic. I hope you know that.”

  “I love you, too. Sometimes I think I’d be lost without you, like I’m adrift in a storm and you’re my life raft. I guess it’s selfish to look at it that way, but—”

  “Just a minute!” Camila called, pulling the phone from her ear. Then her voice returned. “Sorry, babe, what were you saying?”

  Victor glanced at the balcony again where one of the men was fanning a deck of cards in his hand. Someone took one of the cards, and the first man guessed what card it was. He got it wrong and tried to explain the mistake he’d made, but the others just roared with laughter.

  “Vic? I’ve gotta go in a minute, so if there was something you wanted to say—”

  “No,” he answered. “No, it’s not important. We should both get back to work.”

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “I will.”

  They said their goodbyes and hung up. A weight seemed to roll off Victor’s shoulders as he returned the phone to the cradle. A week or two—that was what he had said, and though he suspected he could stretch that timeline out longer if he needed to (much longer, probably), he was also aware there would come a point when his excuses no longer held water, when doubts - the kind that set their roots in so deep you could almost never pull them out - would germinate and all the trust they had built for months would be choked out.

  Of course, he would never let that happen. Camila was a rare woman, and Victor was no fool—he knew someone like her only came along once in a lifetime, and if he ruined things with her, he might never get a chance to set it right.

  He stretched and yawned, feeling as if he had spent too long cooped up inside. When he pushed through the door, he was met by the lazy, hazy brightness of a summer afternoon. Long shadows were pooling on the eastern slopes of the mountains, but otherwise it seemed as if the day was at a standstill, a postcard of rugged beauty: the snowcapped peaks fading dimly into the distant sky, a lake lying blue and serene between the shoulders of the mountains like a sister flanked by her protective brothers, strings of clay-roofed buildings cutting through evergreen forests. Victor did not know the name of those towns, nor did he know the names of the lake or even the mountains. Maybe he would have time to learn them before he left.

  The laughter faded and the others turned to regard him. “As you were,” he said, resting his arms on the stone balcony and looking out toward the blue lake. There were steep bluffs cutting up from the edge of the water, and he imagined how it would be to drive down there and climb them, putting his entire trust in the strength of his fingers and his own stubborn determination.

  “How are things at home?” Peter asked, leaning beside Victor. He was wearing a tailored suit complete with vest and tie—a bit formal, but there was reason to be formal. Today was a special occasion. It was the day they would strike back.

  “Peachy,” Victor replied, glancing over his shoulder at the four gathered behind him and talking amongst themselves. “You sure we can trust these men?”

  “You vetted them yourself.”

  It was true. Victor had spent that morning with a pot of coffee and a stack of dossiers, reading about the mercenaries who had come to be employed by the reclusive billionaire. They all went by code names. There was Ajax, a Cockney bodybuilder who had served in the British navy; Razorback, who had completed a few tours in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army; Keno, a hacker who had no military experience but was an expert at designing viruses (the virtual kind) and cracking into databases; and finally Khan, who had spent most of his career in the Jordanian special forces.

  Peter had found most of them at some point of crisis in their lives. Ajax and Razorback had both been dishonorably discharged—Ajax for assaulting an officer, Razorback for smuggling drugs. Keno still had active warrants on his head from several European countries, as well as the U.S., for cyber crimes. The only one among the group whose inclusion Victor could not figure was Khan. It appeared he had left the Jordanian Special Forces directly to work for Peter.

  “I think they have some problems with authority,” Victor replied.

  “And you don’t?”

/>   Victor laughed. “I’ve never been court-martialed. There are no warrants for my arrest, either.”

  “So you think they’re a liability?” Peter asked.

  “I didn’t say that. But if we want to take down Nichibotsu, we need to be careful not to draw undue attention.” He was thinking of a blackboard set up in the adjacent room scrawled with partial names, dates, locations, vague personal descriptions.

  Peter was watching him. “Do you know why I hired these men? Because they were desperate. They tried to live within the system, and the system failed them. They are outsiders, cast-offs, renegades.”