Without Kotesh, he had nothing. Tom stared at him, unable to accept what this meant: the truth about someone decent and kind had died with a man who was neither.
Three years ago, Tom had flown to Paris to visit his brother. Eric had been working for a pharmaceutical company. The offer from the firm had been too good to refuse. What little they’d inherited from their parents was going fast, and Eric was determined to lift them out of the middle-class poverty they were shocked to find themselves in. Eric was like that. There was nothing he wouldn’t eagerly endure in the name of responsibility. And even now, as Tom remembered this about his brother, it filled him with the warming pride that makes people cry at college graduations.
The day before he flew home, he and Eric had gone out for beers. Tom remembered nothing about the rest of the night. The next morning, Eric said they’d had too much to drink, but there was something he wasn’t telling him. When Tom left for the airport, he paused outside the apartment door like he always did when he didn’t want to leave a place, and he thought he heard Eric crying. He stood there for almost a minute, telling himself: Go in. Come on. It’s your brother. What if he needs you? But he was late for his plane, and the taxi outside was honking.
Three weeks later, Eric disappeared, and all traces that he’d ever existed went with him. Six months after that, his body was found in Tangier.
That was when the changes started. Tom felt different. Then he was different. He was stronger, faster. The changes were small at first. But they grew bigger. Then they grew worse.
Now he stood over the bodies of seven men, hoping the answer to what happened to him would also be the answer to what happened to Eric. He searched the apartment and the men’s bodies. Only one had anything on his phone. He’d mapped an address: JN, 55 Rue de Verdun, Saint-Cloud.
Someone coughed.
In the silence, it was an explosion of sound. Tom lurched back, almost tripping over the leg of a table. He felt something heavy shift on top of it and turned in time to stop a lamp from toppling over.
It took him a moment to identify the new sound in the room: the wet suck of oxygen. He followed it through the darkness back to Kotesh’s body.
The little muscles around Kotesh’s trachea were straining to pull breath into his throat. All it would take was a few pounds of pressure on either side of the airway. He stared at Kotesh’s throat longer than he should have.
Gently he turned Kotesh’s head to face him. When he saw Kotesh’s eyes were still open, he slapped him lightly on the cheek.
“Ben. Ben Kotesh. Can you hear me?”
No response.
“Can you hear me?”
Kotesh moved his head.
“Ben, I’m going to help you, but you need to answer my questions.”
Kotesh’s eyes moved around the room without seeming to lock on any part of it. He couldn’t talk—probably couldn’t hear either—so Tom needed to think. The bodies could be here for four or five days before the smell reached the neighbors. Kotesh would bleed out long before then, and Tom had a week at most before the CIA figured out what he was up to.
Another option came to him.
He walked out of the apartment, and as he left the building, he pulled the fire alarm. He didn’t know the exact sequence this would set in motion, but he had an idea. Once news of what happened to Kotesh hit the wires, the CIA would launch an investigation—and he would find a way to become a part of it.
As he turned onto Avenue of Martyrs, something else dawned on him. Whoever had been in Kotesh’s apartment had followed him yesterday to find it.
In that case he didn’t have a week after all.
CHAPTER 3
When Karl landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport at 10:00 PM, he lurched awake and looked around the cabin trying to remember where he was.
Sixteen hours earlier he’d been on Fort Irwin, in the armpit of the California desert, getting drunk and gorging on discount items from a Walgreens after-holiday candy dump. On his tiny television, there was an infomercial for something called the Juice Tiger, which featured a ferocious eighty-year-old in a tracksuit who, every time the host asked him if juicing really worked, would start doing abdominal crunches and angrily ask, “Does it work? Does this look like it’s working, Dave?” Then three enlisted guys barged into the empty barracks where he’d been kept isolated for months. They told him he had to be on a transport right now.
This is it, he thought. They’re finally taking you to jail.
But the aircraft, a cavernous C-17 Globemaster he sat in the back of all alone, had taken him to Dulles. Once there, he’d been given a Delta Air Lines ticket to the spot he was now: Paris.
A little girl in a “Juicy” T-shirt was standing in the aisle, picking her nose rhythmically and staring up at the overhead bin. When Karl popped it open, he found a gigantic stuffed rabbit with a demented, crack-cocaine expression on its face and tried to hand it to her. The girl glanced at the rabbit, glanced at him, then wiped the finger that had been in her nose up to the knuckle across his duffel bag. As he stood there wondering how exactly he felt about this, the girl’s mother took the rabbit out of his hand, giving him a look like they were in her daughter’s bedroom and she’d just caught him sneaking in the window. He told himself he ought to be used to this. He was six-four, and he had the kind of face that made people think, Axe murderer.
While he waited, dehydrated and thirsty, to get off the plane, the girl’s mother turned around, and he noticed a juice box on the little girl’s meal tray. He took it. The girl watched in quiet awe as he punched the straw in and sucked until the empty box made a slurping sound.
As she started to voice the beginnings of an objection, he pointed at her. “We’re even.”
Inside the terminal, flat-screen TVs showed gorgeous newspeople standing urgently outside a Paris apartment building, where the bodies of six men had been found in a “human pile.” Travelers huddled under the screens in groups, and strangers looked at each other and shook their heads as if to say: Why does the world have to be this way?
Past security, Karl noticed a young man stop and look at him, then approach tentatively.
“Mr. Lyons?”
Karl looked him over. “They know not to send anyone.”
The young guy smiled, shy but good-natured. “Well, you know how they can be.”
On the drive over, he kept eyeing Karl but didn’t say anything until they hit the Arc de Triomphe.
“I’m Tom Blake, by the way.”
He looked like something out of a college brochure. Not like the eunuch they always put on the cover, who if he were any more intellectually stimulated would be running naked through wheat. No, he looked like the kid on the edge of the picture, who’s just been yanked out from beneath miles of thought and who stares at the camera just a little too long and a little too hard.
Karl simply nodded, and they drove the rest of the way in silence.
With its upper floors hidden by trees, the US embassy in Paris was a fortress you couldn’t quite see. Perimeter security was two tiered. The outer tier featured two-foot-thick concrete cones that could stop anything short of a large and persistent tank. The inner tier consisted of a spiked black fence with guard stations that looked like telephone booths. The outer ring kept vehicles out. The inner ring kept people out. Tom stopped at the gates to show his ID. Thick cylinders—bollard barriers—sucked into the ground, allowing them to pass.
Inside the building, Karl was struck by how busy it was—both for 10:30 at night and for Paris. There were senior men and women making phone calls in the lobby, young people in wrinkled suits getting out of the elevator, and still others trying to get in.
That was when Marty Litvak entered through the lobby. A five-foot space of no-man’s-land formed around him.
It may have been the only US intelligence agency that existed outside of presidential control, but the CIA crawled with politics. French Revolution politics. And after decades of hearings and purges and survivors fl
oating around in bureaucratic stasis, everyone beamed with the morbid curiosity that went with it: Will Martin Litvak remain head of a major desk or will his head wind up on one?
Officially, the CIA had no rank structure. There were no lieutenants, no special agents in charge. Instead the hierarchy went by pay grade. And by that standard, Marty was the richest man in the building.
Karl watched as Marty walked into the elevator, and six people efficiently shifted to the other half of it.
Marty was holding a slim phone to his ear when Karl opened the door to Marty’s office. He motioned Karl into the CEO-size suite, which was fitted with the trim furniture Karl associated with London bankers who only ate sushi. The office was dark except for a desk lamp. The late hour didn’t show on Marty. He was one of those people who becomes timeless in an office.
Karl stood, fingering his luggage. Although Marty was almost sixty, he’d always reminded him of the young men in black-and-white photographs. His eyes held a work ethic and an acceptance of responsibility that people said didn’t exist anymore.
When Marty finally hung up, he inspected Karl head to toe. Then frowned. “You’re still dressing like an autistic person.”
Karl glanced down at the olive-drab pants he’d found on the base. They looked like he’d slept in them. Or like Dom DeLuise had slept in them, and then died in them.
They eyed each other, grinning. Then Marty gestured to a chair as if just remembering. Karl dropped his stuff on the floor except for his computer bag, which he slid on Marty’s desk, displacing a marble ball held up by expensive-looking twigs.
“So how’s the diet?” Karl said.
“It’s not a diet, Karl.”
Marty practiced CRON—Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition—in the hope that by consuming 30 percent fewer calories, he would live 30 percent longer.
“Why am I here?” Karl said.
“Well, you’re no longer welcome at Bragg. Or Little Creek.”
Marty opened a file.
“The CO there made you move into a”—Marty flipped the page, smiled—“a Super 8 motel. Tell me, did they leave the light on for you?”
“That’s Motel 6.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Motel 6 leaves the light on for you.”
“What does Super 8 do for you?”
“Super 8 doesn’t do shit, Marty. It’s like a Denny’s with beds and people crying at night in Spanish. Now what the hell do you want?”
Marty took a breath and pressed both palms against the top of his desk. For a second exhaustion hung on his face. “We need a go-to. Notwithstanding what happened in Canada and your subsequent behavior, some people still think you’re one of ours. Including me.”
Karl watched Marty. For them to bring him back, something must have scared them pretty bad.
Marty pushed a photo into the glow of the lamp. “Paris police got a call this morning. This is what they found.”
The photo was of a pile of bodies. One man’s forearm jutted at an off angle from his elbow, held in place only by skin. Another’s jaw had collapsed on one side.
“One of them survived,” Marty said, “the person we think was the actual target.”
“What is this? Why am I here?”
“The sole survivor is Benjamin Kotesh.”
Three years ago they’d used Kotesh to help them move materials for Project Prometheus. He was a corrupt corporate security professional, which was why they used him.
“Kotesh’s right hand was crushed,” Marty said. “He’ll probably lose it. He was interrogated before he was shot, so the shooter may have only had time to fire once. That shot, by the way, was to the head. It’s a miracle Kotesh survived.”
“Interesting choice of words.”
Marty retracted the photo and made it disappear into a drawer in the desk. His eyes flicked back to the computer bag on his desk. Marty had a mild case of OCD—which was why Karl put it there.
“Where’s Kotesh now?” Karl said.
“The French won’t tell us. They’ve actually got something for the first time since World War II. I suppose they want to make it last.”
“That will take diplomacy. You don’t need me for that.”
Marty produced a second photo. His face was obscured in shadow, but Karl could see the fear in it.
“This is why you’re here,” Marty said. “It was taken the same night.”
He pushed the photo over. It was grainy, obviously from a security camera that pointed down a narrow street. The lens was so wide the roofs of the buildings on each side of the street were visible.
Marty pointed to a black speck on the roof. “Langley thinks—and I agree—that this is a boot.” There were motion lines around it, but Karl could make out the heel. It was cocked back as though whoever it was had just jumped from one roof to the other. “And that’s a thirty-four-foot jump. The world record is twenty-nine and change.”
Karl picked up the photo and stared at the boot. There was only one person in the world it could belong to.
He noticed his fingers were shaking. Marty noticed too. They both stared at them, agreeing with them.
“Marty, you told me—you assured me—he died two and a half years ago. Medullary thyroid cancer, wasn’t it? You actually went to the trouble to make that up.”
“We lost him.”
For a moment Karl couldn’t speak. He stared at Marty’s lapels, wanting to grab him by them.
The man who they’d lost was Ian Bogasian, the first and last human test subject of Prometheus. Considering what happened with the chimpanzee outside Paris, what they did to him never should have been done at all.
“You lost him?” Karl said. “How do you lose him? He weighs 270 pounds.”
“We set up a new program. We were trying to…manage his symptoms. At times we allowed him to leave the facility—monitored, of course. A couple months ago, he just disconnected.”
“My god, you’re crazy.”
Marty didn’t say anything.
“Tell me the truth or I’ll walk. Was he running ops?”
Marty folded his hands, unfolded them.
And Karl had his answer. He flashed on Sammy Badis, a Harvard-educated heroin dealer who’d made a foray into machine-gunning American oil workers in Algeria. A year ago they’d found his body at a resort in Morocco where one of the Kardashians was supposedly staying. His chest had been crushed, and so had his hand—which was strange because there was no bruising on the outside. Nobody could figure this out, because how do you break the large bones in someone’s hand without using something hard, like a hammer?
There were others on the kill list who’d died under odd circumstances. Many, many of them.
The official term for someone like Bogasian was NOC, non-official cover operative. That’s what Karl had been for the past decade. He’d started in the army where he’d been just another piece of meat from the hills. Then he’d worked his way to the teams and from there to the CIA. But Bogasian represented the next generation of people like Karl. Or at least that had been the idea once.
Karl stared at Marty. “Why would Bogasian kill someone associated with Prometheus three years after the fact?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he coming after us?”
“I don’t think so. I believe someone else found out about him and is running him, and they’ve figured out how to treat his symptoms, keep him online. But I don’t know why he’d go after Kotesh. Kotesh’s involvement ended three years ago. He’s irrelevant.”
That only makes it worse, Karl thought, Bogasian killing without any seeming point.
“How do you know Bogasian’s even working for someone?” he asked.
“I’m assuming he’s working for someone else because I’m assuming the worst, of course.”
“Is that the worst? Imagine him out there, totally unchecked. I still think of those women in St. Petersburg.”
“We agreed never to speak of that.”
&nbs
p; Neither one of them said anything.
“When this massacre came in, it went straight up the line. And now our own people think we have the largest technology gap our country has faced since the Russians shot Yuri Gagarin into space. They’re shitting themselves.”
“Imagine what they’ll do to you when they find out you’re the one who made him—and then lost him.”
“Well, I really couldn’t have done it without you, Karl. Please don’t forget that. I know I haven’t.”
Another silence.
Marty tapped the photo of the boot. “That brings me to what we need you to do.”
“I know what you need me to do.”
“You can’t kill Bogasian until we’ve found out who’s running him. That’s priority one.”
“I liked him, you know. Before everything tipped over.”
“I know that. You don’t need to tell me that.”
“None of this is his fault. He’s sick.”
“Then it’s a mercy.”
Marty watched him for a moment.
“No one can ever make a man do an evil thing,” he said. “They can only appeal to what was always there.”
Karl didn’t say anything.
“There are already three official investigations going. Some of us want our own snake eater working in parallel. Now with your cooperation—your full cooperation—a certain investigation by the inspector general, into you soiling yourself in Canada last year, will not make its way to Justice next month. And will not ever.”
“And the field?” The words came out funny, high-pitched, like a boy’s. Karl smiled, embarrassed by the need within his request. And Marty smiled back, equally aware of this need.
Marty continued as though he’d never stopped. “Furthermore you would then be eligible to return to…real work. No more bunking with trigger-pullers in the bush.”
Karl could feel inside himself a desperate stupid hope, which always meant one thing: walk away. Generosity from a man like Marty came with strings attached, and those strings led places.
But then he thought of Fort Irwin, where he’d spent the past six months. Time had stretched out in front of him until he couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it pass. Time put him in its infinite white space. A couple times a month, he’d find himself in the shower with no memory of how long he’d been there or what body part he’d just been washing.
The Prometheus Man Page 2
