by Ted Dekker
He stepped into the room, gun still leading.
That distant voice in his head was asking him questions—such as whether he should reconsider shooting two people in cold blood, challenging how he could do this without considerable turmoil. He shut the voice down.
Two doors led out of the room, one on each side. Voices from the one on the left. He broke toward the left, turned the door handle slowly, and then crashed through with enough force to bury the door-knob in the wall plaster.
A black-haired Caucasian with gray bangs and sideburns sat across a table from a lanky woman with straight blond hair rolled into a bun. They looked at him, not surprised. He hesitated, thrown off by their calm demeanor. Carl knew the look of a man about to die. This wasn’t it.
“Hello, Peter,” the man said.
No head shots. Carl leveled the gun at the man who’d spoken. “Joseph and Mary Fabin?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “Please lower the weapon, Peter.”
American accent. No fear, only calm resolve. The man and woman had been expecting him. And they both called him Peter, not Carl. On their own, neither of these facts would have kept Carl from squeezing the trigger. Together, they presented an obstacle that distracted him from the light at the end of his tunnel, from killing and running and saving his wife and his son.
Joseph Fabin stood. “They told you your name was Carl Strople, am I correct?”
One hour. Kelly’s and Matthew’s lives hung in the balance, and he was standing here contemplating nonsense from an American who should be dead by now.
Carl didn’t answer.
“But your name isn’t Carl. It’s Peter Marker. You were an independent contractor for the CIA before you went missing two years ago. It seems that you have more stored up in that mind of yours than the agency is willing to surrender.”
Carl doubted he had more than twenty minutes left.
“Remove your jacket,” he said to Joseph.
Fabin’s eyes narrowed barely, but after thinking his situation through, he peeled off his jacket.
“I have something I think you should hear,” Joseph said. He reached into his jacket, which now lay over his right arm. “May I?” Carl hesitated.
Joseph pulled out a small black tape recorder, tossed the jacket on the couch to his right, and pressed the Play button. A woman’s voice spoke through a light static.
“Peter, it’s Kelly. I’m begging you, please come home to us. Matthew cries at night . . .” Her voice trailed off, then came back stronger. “I don’t care what they’ve done to you, you hear? I need you, Matthew needs you. Please, I’m begging you. I’m making this recording for a Mr. Joseph Fabin with the CIA. Please come home with him, Peter. If you can hear me, please.”
Fabin turned the tape off. “Do you recognize her voice?”
The room faded for a brief moment, then sprang back into focus. Was it Kelly? He couldn’t tell. Impossible! Kelly had been bound by his side today! He’d seen her eyes and known the truth.
“It’s your wife,” Mary said. “I talked to her this morning by phone in Brussels, where you were stationed. Two years is a long time. Longer than I would wait for a missing husband. She obviously loves you. Our orders are to take you home.”
“I saw my wife less than an hour ago,” Carl said.
“Whoever you saw an hour ago wasn’t Kelly. Impossible, my friend. Kelly is in Brussels.”
“How did you know I would be coming here? If you’re with the CIA, why the guard outside?”
Joseph studied him for several seconds, then sighed and sat back down. “Have a seat, Peter.” He indicated a third chair.
Confusion swarmed Carl, but he refused to let the light at the end of the tunnel wink out. His palms had gone sweaty and his tongue was dry and his heart was pounding, but he forced his mind to the point.
The hour was expiring. Even if he left now, he would have trouble returning to the compound in time.
“Fine, stand. But lower the weapon. Really, Peter.”
Send the bullet. Send it now.
“We’ve been closing in on a highly specialized underground operation known only as the X Group, which was founded by a man named Laszlo Kalman,” the man said. “They have been known to kidnap government operatives, agents, even military regulars who fit a certain profile, strip their minds of memories and identities, and then retrain them as assassins. You were sighted six days ago after a two-year absence, which explains the tape recording.”
Carl hit a wall. He knew he was faced with a decision that couldn’t wait more than a few seconds. Either the woman who’d been strapped down beside him had been lying and wasn’t his wife, or the man before him was lying.
“We know everything, Peter. We know you were sent to kill us, and we let you come because we know something that neither you nor Kalman could possibly—”
Carl shot the man in the chest.
Joseph Fabin grunted and grabbed at a red hole in his shirt. Carl swiveled the gun to the woman. His slug knocked her clean off her chair, like a mule kick to the gut. They both hit the ground at the same time, only because the man’s fall had been stalled by his chair.
The sound of his gunshots lingered, chased by a high-pitched whine in his ears.
He didn’t know who Joseph and Mary Fabin were, but he knew they were lying. Not because they’d slipped up, but because he knew that the woman who’d looked into his soul while they were strapped to a bed back at the compound was the woman he loved.
He’d come to save Kelly and Matthew, and their lives depended on his ability to kill these two and return within the hour. Carl hurried to the couch, slipped into Joseph Fabin’s jacket, and headed out.
The killing had been a strangely emotionless affair. That was the last analytical thought that Carl allowed himself before running from the room. He stopped long enough outside the door to return the guards’ guns and pull the Makarov from his thigh.
No sign that anyone had heard the shots. He sprinted to the stairs and descended quickly, shoving the Makarov into the waistband at his back.
Carl exited the stairwell and walked directly toward the kitchen, nodding once to a maid who watched him casually. Still no pursuit.
Shoes. He needed his shoes for the run. He snatched them from behind the laundry bin and stepped out into the sunshine.
A thin layer of sweat coated his body, and the base of his skull throbbed with pain. These he could deal with easily enough. But he required more than mental strength to reach the compound in time to save Kelly.
He shrugged out of the jacket and donned his shoes. For a moment he felt panic edge into his nerves. He wasn’t going to make it, was he? And what if the man I just killed was speaking the truth? The thought fueled his panic, but just as he had done a dozen times in the last hour, he shut the emotion out.
When Carl stood from tying his shoes, his hands were shaking. He could actually see them quivering in the afternoon light, as if connected to a circuit that had been thrown. The sight didn’t correlate with his thin reality. There was more, so much more to what was happening to him than this mission revealed. Somewhere deep below his consciousness, the voice protested.
Carl clenched his hands to still the tremor, turned north, and ran toward the light at the end of the tunnel.
HE DIDN’T know how long he’d been running. Every nerve, every muscle, every brain wave was focused on reaching that light as fast as humanly possible.
He tapped reservoirs of strength that exceeded reasonable ability. Deep in the blackness of his own mind, he found a place of power. He knew because he’d been there before.
The realization gave him some warmth. Hope. Whoever he was, Kelly would help him understand. He’d looked into her eyes and seen love. And Matthew . . .
The thought of his son filled him with an unexpected burst of love and energy. He whispered Matthew’s name as he ran.
To his surprise, the emotion grew until he thought he might cry. He was still running, but his focus had b
een shattered and his vision blurred. Allowing himself to feel this kind of love for his son was intoxicating—like a drug equally pleasing and destructive.
He caught himself, steeled his mind against the destructive power of the emotion, and refocused on the tunnel.
The compound looked vacated when Carl crested the hill that hid it. But it wasn’t. The buildings were all there, hiding their secrets, like Jonestown in the jungles of Guyana.
He sprinted toward the building that had held Kelly. The window he’d climbed from an hour ago was still open, as if it, too, had been abandoned. He reached it and pulled up, panting hard.
The bed was there, red nylon cords cut and dangling from the metal frame. Kelly was not.
Carl dove through the window, smashing his knee in the process. He landed on the floor.
“Kelly?”
Only his hard breathing answered him. He was too late!
The tremble returned to his hands and spread to his whole body. For the briefest of moments, he felt shame, not for failing Kelly, but for being overcome. He staggered to his feet and let a new emotion crowd his mind. Anger. Rage.
“Kelly! Where is my wife?”
He was wheezing. Standing with fists tight, wheezing like a . . .
Ssssss . . .
Carl spun to his right. A translucent vapor hissed from a small hole in the wall. They were gassing him. He knew this because he’d been gassed before. And he also knew that it was too late to run from it. He would pass out in less than five seconds, no matter what he did, or where he went.
Kelly is alive.
It was his last thought before he fell.
4
Carl?”
The sound of her distant voice came to him like an angel.
“Carl.”
His mind began to clear. How many times had he awakened with the sound of an angel in his ear? This time Kelly was here, which meant that . . .
Kelly?
Carl opened his eyes. He was on a hospital bed with the bright round lamps above him and the large humming machines on each side. But he wasn’t restrained.
He sat up.
“Hello, Carl.”
He turned to the voice and saw a familiar man. Tall, thin, dark hair that was graying on the sides. Bushy eyebrows. Did he know this man? Yes. This was Kalman. Laszlo Kalman.
Beside him stood the doctor. Agotha Balogh. She wore a white smock over a blue dress and held a cup of tea, which she now set down on the counter.
“Hello, Carl.”
Carl looked to his right. Kelly leaned against the counter, arms crossed, smiling. There was no sign of any injury on her leg where he’d seen Englishman shoot her. She wore black dungarees, much like his own. A brown cotton turtleneck.
“Welcome home,” she said.
His first impulse was relief. Sweet, sweet relief. Enough to make him feel weak. His wife was safe.
But why no wound?
“Kelly?”
“Yes. Kelly.” Her eyes flashed blue like the sea. She stepped away from the counter. “You did well. I’m very proud of you.”
Carl stared at her leg. It supported her without any sign of weakness. How . . . ?
He looked into her eyes, suddenly terrified by confusion. “Is Matthew—”
“You have no son,” Kalman said. “Kelly is not your wife.”
Familiar voices screamed through his mind, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He’d been here before, but he didn’t know where here was.
Had he killed two people in the Andrassy Hotel, or was that all part of an elaborate dream? He lifted his hand to the back of his head and felt the small cut at the base of his skull. Real. He wiggled his toes and felt the small pain of the wound between them. Real.
Kelly stepped closer and stopped five feet from him, still looking into his eyes with pride. Still smiling.
“The drugs are still in your system, but they’ll wear off. You did very well this time, Carl. I knew you could do it.”
Did he love this woman? Or was that a deception?
Agotha spoke with a distinct Hungarian accent. “Your name is Carl Strople. Do you remember?”
He hesitated. “Yes.”
“You’ve been in training here for nearly a year. The mission you just completed was your tenth of twelve before we put you into the field. Do you remember?”
Now that she’d said it, he did. Not the missions specifically, but the fact that he had been here a long time. Training. His mind was still on Kelly. What did she mean to him? What had he done for her?
He couldn’t think clearly enough to ask, much less answer, the questions.
“We call you Saint,” Agotha said.
The name ignited a light in Carl’s mind. He blinked. Saint. He’d been covertly recruited for Black Ops and given his life to the most brutal kind of training any man or woman could endure. He was here because he belonged here. To the X Group.
“You remember?”
“I remember.”
“Good,” Agotha said. “The mission you just executed was an important test of your skills. You must forgive us for deceiving you, but it was necessary to test your progress. Naturally, Englishman didn’t actually shoot Kelly in her leg. It was only made to look like he did. The two people you shot at the Andrassy wore vests with pockets of red dye. The woman suffered a broken rib, but otherwise they are quite alive.”
Carl stared at her, stupefied. No head shots. No one else may be killed. The whole mission was a setup.
“You performed exceptionally well,” Agotha said. “We are proud of you.”
“Thank you.” He lowered his eyes and rubbed his fingers, trying to fill in a thousand blanks. But he couldn’t. “Why can’t I remember?”
Agotha nodded once, slowly, as if she had expected this question. “Our training is invasive. We train the mind as much as we train the body. You knew this when you agreed to the Group’s terms. It was what you wanted. And you have proven that our techniques produce results. And rewards. You are important to your country, Carl.”
“Which country?”
“The United States.”
Kalman seemed satisfied to study Carl with a dark stare. There was something about him that struck Carl as obscene. But in a good way, perhaps.
Carl held Kalman’s gaze for a long time, trying to understand his confusion. But he was trained not to trust his feelings, wasn’t he? He was, in fact, trained to control his feelings by shutting them down entirely.
He didn’t know how he felt about Laszlo Kalman.
Or Kelly, for that matter.
“The implant is real?” he asked Agotha.
“Yes. You’ve had it for many months. It is our way of tracking you.”
“Or terminating you,” Kalman said.
So Englishman had spoken the truth on that count. Carl avoided Kelly’s eyes. For some reason she alone was able to penetrate his emotional guard.
Agotha frowned at Kalman. “We made a small incision this morning to create the impression that it was recently inserted.”
“I’m being trained as an assassin,” he said.
“You already are one. But you’re much more than just an assassin. Only seven of more than a hundred recruits have ever finished all twelve training missions and entered the field.”
“The rest?”
“Are dead,” Kalman said.
Carl remembered that now. He was quite sure he’d asked these same questions dozens of times.
“As you will be if you fail.”
“You kill your own recruits?”
“Only when they fail. We all die.”
Maybe this was why he found Kalman obscene. But he didn’t think so—deep down he understood what the dark man said.
“You’ll spend two days in regression before your next training exercise,” Kalman said. He walked toward the door. “Take him to his quarters.” The director of the X Group left him with Agotha and Kelly, whose eyes he still avoided.
Agotha put he
r hand on his shoulder. She seemed enthralled by him, a scientist examining her prize specimen.
“I knew you could do it,” she said. “One day you may be stronger than Englishman.”
Agotha glanced at Kelly, then walked out of the room.
“You’re upset with me,” Kelly said.
“Am I?”
“Yes, you are.”
Carl looked at her. “I’m confused. I’m not quite sure who I am. Or, for that matter, who you are.”
“Then I’ll tell you who we are.”
She stepped up to him and reached out her hand. He took it only because she offered it in such a way that suggested she’d done so many times before.
Kelly led him from the room into a long, familiar concrete hall, offering no explanation of who either of them was.
His thoughts returned to the outburst of love he’d felt when he heard his son’s name. Matthew. Even now the name pulled at his heart. How could that be, if it was only a name?
“I don’t have a son named Matthew.”
“No. But we helped you believe that you did for the sake of this test. You acted under that pretense and you did precisely as you should have done. I’m very pleased.”
They walked through a door at the hall’s end, onto a cement landing, then down five concrete steps that led to browned grass. She waited until they were twenty yards away from the building before speaking again.
“We have recording devices in all the buildings. I wanted to speak to you without being heard. I’m sorry for the confusion, Carl. I really am. Every time they do this to you, you forget that you can trust me.”
How could he answer that? She’d lied to him; he could never trust her. And yet he knew already that he not only wanted to trust her but would.
“What I did was horrible,” she continued. “I laid next to you and convinced you that I was your wife. That we had a child. Terrible, yes, but I did it for you.” Her grip on his hand momentarily tightened. “You have to succeed, Carl. My greatest gift to you today was convincing you beyond any shadow of a doubt that you loved me and would do anything for me, including shooting two people who offered you a plausible alternate truth. If you failed to show complete loyalty to the set of facts you were fed, you would be dead now, and I couldn’t live with that.”
