The Shadow Walker

by William R Hunt

  “Just like that.”

  “And what happens when we’re the last ones standing?”

  “Then we go our separate ways. I don’t give a damn what you do. As for me, I’ll go back to life as usual. You’ll never hear from me again.”

  “So you won’t consider getting back at us for this…interference? It wouldn’t even cross your mind?”

  Graves shook his head. “My business with Nichibotsu ended as soon as those scientists disappeared. I don’t owe them a thing.”

  Peter pointed at the paper. “First write the names. Then we’ll talk.”

  Graves opened his mouth to protest, but he stopped himself. Perhaps he knew, as Victor did, how this would go: He would refuse to write the names for fear they would kill him afterward, and then Peter would threaten to harm his daughter. Graves would either call them liars, risking his daughter’s safety, or write down the names and hope they showed some humanity.

  Graves started writing.

  Victor looked at Peter. “A word?”

  They moved a few paces away. Victor kept an eye on Graves just in case he tried running.

  “Think about it,” Victor said in a low voice. “He’s offering to do the dirty work for us.”

  “Have you forgotten my name’s on that list, Vic?”

  “So we explain he’s to leave Peter Krieg alone.”

  Peter laughed softly.

  “What’s so funny?” Victor asked.

  “You really seem to think he won’t figure it out. You’re asking me to hand him my identity and trust he doesn’t come after me.”

  “Maybe it’s a risk we need to take.”

  “That’s easy for you to say—your neck isn’t on the line.”

  Victor watched Graves and thought about the little girl, Latisha, who might never see her father again. “So what do you want to do then?” he asked Peter.

  Peter’s gray eyes were calm and cool. “You know what has to be done. He knows too much.”

  “He doesn’t have to die, Peter.”

  “He’s a drug dealer and a trafficker. And don’t forget, he nearly had you killed. I’d say his crimes have caught up with him.”

  “And what about his daughter? Does she deserve to lose her father?”

  Peter shook his head, disappointed. “I didn’t think you would be so soft. If you want, I can ask one of the others to do it for you.”

  Graves finished writing the names and held the list toward them. “Here it is,” he said, staring earnestly at them. “This is everything you wanted—all the names are there, everyone responsible for the research at the laboratory.”

  Peter took the pad of paper, turned, and without a word retreated to the van.

  Graves regarded Victor. “He put it on you, huh?”

  “Save it,” Victor answered. “I’ve seen your rap sheet. You had this one coming.”

  “Maybe so. But have you stopped to think what it might do to you? How it might eat you from the inside?”

  Victor pointed the gun at Graves’s head.

  “Think of my daughter,” Graves pleaded, staring directly into Victor’s eyes. “Maybe I deserve this, maybe I do. But she doesn’t. She’s innocent.”

  “You should have thought about that a long time ago,” Victor answered, gritting his teeth and trying not to think about the little girl who would grow up without a father. Had there been a shootout in the nightclub, Victor would have killed Graves without a second thought. But out here, just the two of them standing near the quiet river—this made him feel like a hitman for the Mob. It felt dirty.

  “You’re right. I should have. But I didn’t, so now I’m asking for a second chance. Please. Please, man, don’t go down this road.”

  “What’s the holdup?” Ajax called from the van.

  “I didn’t send anyone after you,” Graves continued. “Whatever your friend claims I did, he’s lying. I don’t know a thing about you.”

  Victor tried to read the truth in Graves’s eyes. He saw no sign that the man was lying, no telltale tic that gave him away. But a condemned man would say anything, feel anything, in order to keep himself alive even a few more seconds, so how could Victor trust anything he said?

  “I don’t have a choice,” Victor said, afraid that if he stared into Graves’s pleading, distraught face much longer, he might start to believe him. “Your sins have caught up to you.”

  Graves nodded slowly, not breaking Victor’s gaze. “Yes they have. And yours will, too.”

  ___

  The first few were the easiest because they expected nothing. One of them took a morning jog and turned down a deserted street, never to be seen again; another went missing from a parking garage, leaving not so much as a scuff-mark on the concrete.

  Some pleaded, some threatened. Some made extravagant promises of money and future favors, while others waxed eloquent cursing their attackers with every name imaginable. The result was the same. All of their bodies would eventually be found, but for some it would be a good long time, long enough for the maggots to prey on them and for their skin to shrivel from their bones. The discovery of their bodies waited sometimes upon the ebb and flow of a river, sometimes upon the path of a night watchman, sometimes upon the schedule of a garbage truck. They were found drowned, asphyxiated, bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot. The only similarity among the numerous deaths was that their faces were always intact and recognizable, as if the killers wanted to make certain they would be identified.

  Their deaths were at first reported as isolated incidents, though with time it became impossible not to connect all the names to Nichibotsu Enterprises. The last few went into hiding and nearly escaped the fate of the others. They were betrayed by simple mistakes: an ill-advised call to an old friend, an ATM withdrawal, a walk into town to stretch the legs.

  Eventually, when the grisly work was done, there was only one name left on the list: Peter Krieg. By this time the names of the board of directors had become public knowledge, and had anyone been able to find Peter Krieg, the elusive billionaire would have been flocked by reporters (not to mention Interpol). But they could not find him. There was a rumor he had hidden himself in a remote Kerovian castle, but the castle was difficult to reach and those who did so found guards with automatic weapons stationed at the gate.

  Peter Krieg became a person of interest in the international investigation, not as a suspect but as someone who might be able to shed light on why the murders were happening. With the spotlight fully turned in his direction, Peter confined himself within the walls of his castle, brooding and waiting for the fervor to die down.

  By this time, the scientists had disappeared. Peter assured Victor they were safe and well-hidden, and besides that most of them held no knowledge of Nichibotsu or who might want a virus capable of crippling the world economy. Weeks had rolled into months, and Victor had broken his word to Camila not once or twice, but three times now. Finally, however, the last name had been crossed off the list and it was time to go home.

  He said so to Peter one evening while standing on the ramparts of the castle. This was the only time Peter ever allowed himself to walk the walls, since he feared agents with binoculars were watching the castle from afar. When Victor answered that they might still be able to see him at night, Peter answered that if they were determined enough to keep watch all through the day and night, then he would pose for whatever picture they liked.

  “I’m returning to the States,” Victor said.

  Peter stood beside him on the ramparts, staring out over the alpine forests. A section of mountainside lay in ruin from strong winds, the slender trees broken like matchsticks as if Godzilla had stomped through. Lower down, the trees disappeared beneath pools of mist.

  “There is no changing your mind this time, is there?” Peter asked.

  Victor did not answer.

  Peter rested his arms on the cold stone. “We have done terrible things,” he whispered, shivering, and for once he sounded uncertain of himself. Suddenly he looked
at Victor. “Do you have nightmares?”

  Victor’s jaw clenched. “No.”

  “I do. I don’t see them—the men and women we killed. Not that I remember. Instead I sense something, as if a great judgment is hanging over me.” His eyes grew wide and hollow in the moonlight. “Were we wrong?”

  Victor leaned beside him against the parapet. He could close his eyes and see the faces, hear the voices, remember the dank and dirty smells of all the places they took them. In the beginning it was easy to justify their actions in the name of the greater good. But what had they expected to find? An unmarked vial locked in a safe? A manifesto on the need to wipe civilizations aside and start fresh? Instead they had found what Victor had known all along they would find: bloodshed, suffering, and a stain of guilt that sank deep and could not be scrubbed away.

  “We did what was necessary,” he answered. He was speaking mostly to himself.

  “Necessary,” Peter whispered. “Yes, I hope so. I hope so for all our sakes. Otherwise…” He did not finish, and that was just fine. It was better not to speak the truth, because the truth was that if their actions had not been necessary, then they were no more than murderers.

  Monsters.

  Victor took a deep breath, thinking about how to say goodbye. The usual phrases seemed insufficient: See you later, Take care, Have a good night. Did he even want to see Peter again? He was not sure. Peter - as well as Khan and the others - had become associated in his mind with deeds he would drink to forget, punish his body with weights and long runs to forget, and he was not sure he would ever be able to separate them again.

  Before he could settle on a goodbye, Peter spoke. “I think they finished the virus.”

  Victor’s brow furrowed. “Did Sophia tell you that?”

  “She didn’t have to. It’s just a suspicion I have—for now. But I want to be ready. If this virus spreads, and if it proves as deadly as advertised, the world will need stability.” He met Victor’s eyes. “I want to begin laying the foundation for a place to start over.”

  Victor studied Peter’s eyes, trying to read whether this thought had just come to him or had been simmering for a while. “You really think it will come to that?”

  “It may. And if it does…I want to be ready.” He paused for a heartbeat. “And I want you to be by my side.”

  “Peter—”

  “I know you must get back to Camila. I know what she means to you. But should my fears prove true about the virus, I hope you will consider joining me. There will be a great deal of work to be done.”

  Victor nodded, noncommittal. He offered his hand. Peter withdrew his own hand from his pocket and placed something in Victor’s palm.

  “What’s this?” Victor asked, looking down.

  “A souvenir, if you will—so you won’t forget me.” He smiled sadly.

  It was Peter’s gold lighter.

  The two men embraced briefly, then they pulled away and nodded at one another. There was nothing left to say. Victor turned and strode along the ramparts, the moon casting a long shadow behind him, and not until he reached the door at the end of the wall did he turn back to look at Peter.

  Peter was gazing into the distance, a night watchman at the height of his vigil.

  Part 4: The Last Bridge

  “Don't go growing a conscience on me," I said. "I've been down that road. It doesn't lead you to anything good.”

  Michael Connelly

  The Fifth Witness

  “Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?”

  Dennis Lehane

  Shutter Island

  Chapter 51

  Thinking back, remembering the life he had spent so much time trying to forget, Victor’s heart was heavy with the futility of his decisions. When he’d left Peter, he had imagined salvaging his relationship with Camila and settling down for good. He had seen it happen to other men: the way family life dulled the hunger of their ambitions, calmed their passions, and focused their attention outward on the lives around them. Victor had at one time despised such men. After returning home from Kerovia, he envied them.

  Now, standing in an alley with the first snowflakes of winter drifting around his face, he tried to tell himself everything was different this time around. Now he knew what he wanted. He was no longer a restless youth in search of a cause, because the cause he served was a cause he had known all along: survival. For some, survival was satisfied with keeping the body alive from one day to the next. For Victor it meant something more. For Victor, survival was not just about the preservation of his body, but of his soul as well—his self-respect, his dignity, his inner code of morals, which had been forcibly reshaped by his decision to help hunt down the board members of Nichibotsu.

  Feeding these inner hungers required something more than hand-to-mouth living. If this meant he must temporarily follow William Yates’s prerogative, so be it. He would look for his opportunity to seize the reins of his fate again, and when the opportunity came, he would take it.

  “You okay?” Dante asked. “You look distracted.” He was wearing a fresh set of clothes, dark jeans and a black American Eagle hoodie. He still wore his trademark Celtics baseball cap, but now it was turned backwards. He was all business tonight.

  “I’m just ready to get moving,” Victor answered, shivering involuntarily. Tiny snowflakes dotted his hair and nestled in the hollows of his ears.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty damn cold,” Dante said, slipping his hands beneath his armpits and hugging himself. “And to think, we could have been sitting snug in that little cabin, propping our feet by a warm fire.”

  “You hated it there.”

  Dante grinned. “I got used to it.”

  “Those are the things that kill you—the things you get used to. Like the cold. Or hunger. It settles in your bones, becoming so familiar that you forget it used to be a stranger.”

  Dante arched an eyebrow. His eyes seemed vibrantly blue against the snow. “Did you come up with that yourself?”

  “Listen, I don’t like this. You know I don’t like this. We should have known better than to expect reasonableness from Communists. This is the way of the world now, though—the strong prey on the weak, and the only way to fight back is to make yourself stronger.” He cupped the side of Dante’s neck with cold fingers. “We owe nothing to that dictator, understand? Understand?”

  Dante bobbed his head. “Yeah, sure. I get it.” His eyes shifted away.

  “So the first chance we get, we need to leave the pack. Sometimes the wolves just don’t get along.”

  Someone whistled behind them. They turned to see a figure beckoning to them from the other end of the alley.

  “It’ll be alright, brother,” Victor said, patting the side of Dante’s neck. “I’ll take care of us. You’ll see.”

  He started walking, satisfied that he had made his point, but then Dante called to him.

  “Listen,” Dante said as he caught up, “don’t do anything crazy, okay? At least not without telling me first?” His face was pinched with worry.

  Victor tried to read his brother’s eyes, but it was impossible in the dark alley. “If I see a chance to get us out of this mess, I’m taking it.”

  “I understand. I’m just asking you not to make the situation any worse.”

  “Worse than this? Worse than being slave labor for a Communist regime? Does that sit well with you, Dante? Have you gotten used to that?” His tone was harsher than he’d intended.

  Dante shifted his gaze again, clenching and unclenching his fists. “Okay, Vic,” he said. “Okay.”

  The cold had been steadily dropping since sundown. Victor did not like traveling in the darkness, but it was not his choice. Yates, Dante had claimed, was paranoid that the Commune was surrounded by spies, and he wanted to make sure the group was not tracked as they left the community. Victor suspected this was yet another case of the Communist leader’s paranoia.

  Four people were waiting for them at the end of t
he alley: Scarlett, Gabriel, a soldier named Yuri, and a small, mousy fellow with round spectacles and a large backpack. He looked like a Mafia bookie on the run, hitchhiking across the country.

  Victor’s eyes briefly met Scarlett’s. She looked away.

  “Who’s the new guy?” he asked Yuri.

  Yuri was tall and thick, with a bullish face and bristling black eyebrows. He looked like he could have stepped right out of the movie Enemy at the Gates. “Pay no attention to him,” Yuri said with a dismissive wave, his voice gruff and Slavic. “He’s not your concern.”

  Scarlett and Gabriel were both armed with AR-15s, while Yuri carried a battered, chipped, but well-oiled Mosin-Nagant without a scope. The man with the spectacles appeared to be unarmed.