“I imagined by this point in the conversation, you’d have a very different expression on your face,” Marty said.
“I’m thinking.”
“Alex is dead. Your parents are dead. You never had children, and you have a sister in South Dakota who doesn’t return your phone calls. It isn’t my place to say it, but where else do you really have to be?”
Karl looked at the floor, then the windows—anywhere but Marty’s eyes.
“If I accept,” he said finally, “there will be nothing that affects any innocent third parties without my knowledge. Promise me.”
Marty leaned forward with the perfect stillness of a man whose anger has crowded out all other impulse. “When you do what we do, when you break the rules of civilization in order to save it, there’s always blowback. And you know it.”
Neither one of them moved.
Finally Marty stood up. “We’re not reporting your presence here to French intelligence, so if you’re caught, the determination of your diplomatic status could go either way. FYI.”
“The French are a mild, rational people. I’m sure they’ll understand.”
“No one else is officially on this. You are not to discuss the photo I showed you with your staff—who by the way are not your staff but are serving you in an advisory capacity only.”
Marty opened the door and motioned to his assistant.
Karl stepped into the waiting area and turned around. “This doesn’t mean I’m your hatchet man. I hope that’s clear.”
“There’s one other thing.” Marty picked up an empty plastic cup off a table and held it up like it contained a fine wine. “We’re going to need you to piss in this. I hear you’ve been hitting the bottle pretty hard.” Marty’s eyes twinkled like he was smiling even though he wasn’t. “You know, Aldrich Ames was an alcoholic too.”
Karl stared at the cup, wanting to slap it out of Marty’s hand with all his might. Welcome back, Karl. Now if you don’t mind, we’re going to need you to get on all fours and lift your hind leg and pee in this cup. It’s only a formality, as is this rolled-up newspaper I’m prepared to spank your nose with.
“So what do you say?” Marty held out the cup.
Karl slowly took it.
Marty smiled. “Your team is already waiting for you. We thought you might say yes.”
So that was that. Karl could hunt down a man he once liked and respected but who was now too dangerous to live. Or he could go to a supermax prison for the next ten to fifteen years, assuming he behaved himself and became a role model to his rapist/murderer peers.
Even though he wasn’t sure he’d ever believed in God, he said a prayer for the good and decent man Bogasian had once been. And he apologized to that man, because he would still exist if Bogasian had never met Karl one afternoon three years ago. Then he walked down the hall and wondered what it’d be like to kill a man for doing exactly what you’d created him to do.
CHAPTER 4
The war room was stocked with human resources. Some people picked at their hands. Others chugged coffee. As Karl walked in, they all swiveled in their chairs and pointed blank faces at him.
The support people lined the walls while the two analysts, James and Henry, sat front and center. They were both around thirty, dressed in business casual, both made plain by careers where success was achieved not through brilliance but by not screwing up.
Karl walked to the front of the room and used the laptop on the podium to log in to the system. For all forty-one years of his life, he’d always felt like a small man in a large man’s body, and even now he couldn’t stand upright. He always stooped, always minimized.
While he waited for the computer to load, his thoughts turned to that pile of bodies and the man who put them there.
You could kill any person anywhere in the world with someone like that. You could take control of a nuclear submarine or a battleship, maybe even a third world country.
And if you figured out how to make more of him, you could be a nation of one—someone with the power of a government and the anonymity of an individual.
On the seventy-inch wall screen, he brought up a picture of Benjamin Kotesh, his ex-associate.
“Give me the financials,” he said to no one in particular.
James and Henry powered to life.
“Two known accounts for Ben Kotesh,” Henry said. “One at Deutsche Bank in Paris, another at Banc Commercial in Berlin.”
“You can tell that already?” Karl said.
“The file on him is pretty decent.”
“Find out the balances on those two accounts.”
Karl heard the door open. Tom, his ride from the airport, walked in and hovered with his back to the wall.
Karl motioned him over to a corner while everyone worked.
“Did Marty send you earlier today?” he asked.
Tom’s expression didn’t change. Not that Karl expected it to.
“You lied to me.”
“In as limited a way as possible, sir. I wanted to make my case for joining your team, but…”
“But what?”
“You didn’t seem to want to talk.”
“How’d you find out I was arriving?”
Tom looked around to make sure no one was watching them. “This room was supposed to be ready at 11:00 PM, which meant you were landing around 10:00. When I walked by Director Litvak’s office to request to join this operation, his assistant wasn’t there but had left the Delta home page up on his computer monitor. Your name was with security. And around 10:00 PM, at the Delta terminal, one flight landed from the United States. Thirty men came out, and the only one who didn’t have a suit on or anyone with him answered to ‘Lyons.’”
Karl noticed that he didn’t smile as he spoke. This would have been a very stupid time to smile.
“I want on this, sir.”
“I thought people lied to get less work, not more.”
Tom glanced at the others again. “Give me forty-eight hours to add value. If I don’t, you won’t even have to say anything. I’ll fire myself.”
Henry interrupted them.
“Sir? There’s no money left in Deutsche Bank and nothing in Commercial.”
Karl thought a moment. The room got quieter.
“Highest balance in the last year?” he asked.
“$550,000 in Deutsche Bank and $550,000 in Commercial. $1.1 million total. Commercial was closed out a couple of days ago. Deutsche Bank two weeks ago.”
“Where did it come from?”
Karl looked over, surprised it was Tom who asked this. It always impressed him to see a shy person forced out of his shyness by ambition. It was painful and wonderful—all at the same time.
“Same source,” Henry said. “Gallen Bancshares. Swiss bank.”
There were sighs. They were premature.
Swiss bank secrecy was a lie—always had been. If there was evidence of a crime, the Swiss would play ball. Kotesh’s money would have been “laddered” through at least three tax havens, including one that wasn’t even a tax haven, just wasn’t on good terms with the US, like Guatemala. It was a lawyer tactic: if you can’t hide your guilt, at least make it too mind-numbingly awful to prove.
“When was the $1.1 million transferred to Deutsche and Commercial from the Gallen?” Karl asked.
“April 4.”
“Do we have access to Gallen’s accounts?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Check for any transfer of approximately $1.2 million to a Gallen account on April 3, any Gallen account.”
There were skeptical looks.
“Any Gallen account, sir?” Henry asked.
“Yeah.”
“May I ask why—”
“The money would have gone into a main account and then been transferred to the account that sent the money wire to Deutsche Bank and Commercial. That way, the main account number stays a secret, even from Deutsche Bank and Commercial.”
“But, sir,” James said, “the to
tal amount was $1.1 million, right on the nose. If we can’t match the amount, we have nothing.”
“The money was just passing through. And I bet about 10 percent went to private client fees. Someone at these banks knows what’s going on. They take their pound of flesh.”
Eyes tilted back down to the screens. James and Henry called out account numbers for people to search.
The bank records they were accessing came from “cooperating” financial institutions. There were two types. The first type employed an asset who gave the CIA account access usually on a voluntary basis but sometimes simply by being a sucker for phishing emails or other types of “social engineering.” The second type was less of an actual friend and more like the sweet, trusting girl on Lifetime who just wants to fall in love but winds up with the panty-sniffing sociopath masquerading as a pediatric cancer specialist. They thought they were in a relationship with RKO Hamilton, a respected cross-border accounting firm. They were actually involved with a CIA front company.
The relationship was abusive. The US government saw to that.
Karl turned to Tom and lowered his voice. “Fine. You have forty-eight hours, but you go under the needle tonight.”
“A polygraph?”
“All these other people have just taken one.” He stared at Tom until he nodded.
James’s head popped up. “There’s a transfer that matches the date and the approximate amount. Very approximate. Name on the account: Alan Sarmad.”
Karl froze.
Sarmad was another name from Prometheus he thought he’d never hear again. Sarmad was a partner in a private shipping company that made the bulk of its money transporting black-market product for organized crime in Europe and Russia. Sarmad had contacts across the Mediterranean, and he could move absolutely anything without questions—from Ukrainian girls who’d answered an ad for modeling work abroad to the human embryos and fetuses that Prometheus required by the pound.
Sarmad had died three years ago—according to Marty.
He’d worked with Kotesh. They knew each other but not that well. So why would Sarmad transfer more than a million dollars to Kotesh now, three years after these two had lost any reason to stay in touch?
“Get an address,” Karl said.
Henry looked surprised. “We already have a file on him.”
People exchanged glances. This was a coincidence, and they had been trained not to like those.
“Then maybe we got our guy,” Karl said, trying to play it down. “What project is he under?”
James looked at his screen. “Project name is…blank. And we have no address for him.”
This was odd.
The entire reason they’d used Sarmad and Kotesh on Prometheus was because nobody would believe the US government would ever have anything to do with men like them. As a further precaution, Marty made sure Kotesh and Sarmad had never been entered into any database. Which meant even the CIA couldn’t connect them to the CIA. And yet someone here had recently created a file on them.
Karl scanned every face in the room. “Find Alan Sarmad. Now. I can guarantee Interpol is connecting this guy as we speak.”
CHAPTER 5
Tom pushed through the door to the basement lab. He couldn’t believe he’d pulled it off and gotten on Karl’s team. He felt like he’d just run several miles—sprinted for his life over those miles. It was sticky where his sweat had dried, and his body was coasting on adrenaline. But he understood: this was the only chance he’d ever get to find out what the CIA knew about Kotesh.
Still, in solving one problem, he’d created another. Karl was suspicious, and he’d be checking Tom’s personnel file soon, if he wasn’t already. When he did that, he’d find that Agent Tom Blake was twenty-five years old, proficient in Russian, and had graduated from Georgetown magna cum laude. There was just one problem.
Tom was not Tom Blake.
He was Tom Reese. And Tom Reese was nobody really. He’d stolen Agent Blake’s identity two months ago, shortly after Agent Blake left the country. Now he was taking his best chance to investigate his brother’s death before the CIA discovered Blake was in two places at the same time. But Karl’s suspicion—and now the polygraph—meant his time as a CIA agent was accelerating toward its expiration date. And so now it was a question of two things: when the hit would come and whether he’d flinch before it did.
His body said, Run. His mind said, You have nothing to run to. His body said, It’s not too late. His mind said, You knew what would happen the day you walked in the door.
The only person in the lab was the tech, who hadn’t heard him come in and continued typing on his computer. Typically a European embassy had zero need for a specialist with a biometrics background. But France was importing a large, increasingly pissed-off Muslim population to replenish its rapidly aging workforce, and the CIA was looking to exchange DNA evidence with French intelligence—of which there were about thirty different agencies to deal with.
The tech was still typing when Tom stopped behind him and slid a two-inch-thick file of names and addresses onto his desk.
The tech glanced at it and sighed. “Not tonight.”
“Not tonight,” Tom said. “Now.”
The tech muttered something. Then as Tom turned for the door, he said, “More reports arrived today.”
Tom spun back. “Any matches?”
“None yet.”
“Let me know when there are.”
“You’re full of it tonight.”
“Maybe I feel lucky.”
The tech chuckled. “Napoleon used to ask his generals if they were lucky or not. So what about you? Are you a lucky person?”
“I used to think so.”
Tom sat in his office, staring at the white walls, gently rocking in his chair. Several weeks ago he’d brought the flannel shirt Eric had died in to the tech. When the tech saw all the blood, he asked who the shirt belonged to. Tom had said that man wasn’t important. It was the others he wanted.
Together they found the DNA of four other men on the shirt. Tom believed these were the men who killed his brother—or were involved enough to leave their DNA on the shirt he died in. The location and type of DNA told him something about each man. One had left sweat around the collar where he’d gripped and re-gripped it. Another left a two-inch patch of spit on the chest. The more Tom learned, the more he wanted to know.
Finding these men was something they had no authority to be doing. Not that the tech knew that. He was carrying around a secret he didn’t know was a secret. Tom had decided to say nothing and assume he wouldn’t talk to anyone rather than ask for discretion and risk suspicion. As far as Tom could tell, the tech’s social life took place outside the office—online. So that was where Tom placed his bet: on modern social isolation. But all it would take was one wrong comment. And for the past two months, he thought about it every morning, first when he woke up with his heart slamming in his chest and then an hour later when he walked into the embassy and felt every eye see him for his crime.
To find out the identities of these four men, he and the tech had started checking the DNA they’d left on the shirt against DNA samples from Interpol and various police departments across Europe. It was a system Tom had lifted from the British police. Hardly anyone knew it, but the British had revolutionized the science of criminal investigation. In the UK, almost everyone who was arrested had to provide a DNA sample, and within a few years the British had amassed the largest DNA database in the world.
That database and others like it were so large that Tom and the tech had to confine their DNA requests to educated people with dual citizenship, which Tom believed his brother’s killers to be. He was sure Eric’s death had something to do with the research job he’d taken in Paris. It was slow going at first—people needed assurances—but it was amazing, and disturbing, how helpful people became when you were calling from a US embassy.
Tom typed in Sarmad’s name and brought up his profile.
Name
: Alan Cagan Sarmad
Aliases: --
Place of birth: Munich, Germany (not verified)
University: Paris-Sorbonne; Russian University for the Friendship of Peoples
Current residence: --
Known addresses: --
Past residence(s): Nice, France; Genoa, Italy; St. Petersburg, Russia
Case officer: [redacted]
Dates Active: [redacted]
Project(s): [redacted]
Tom clicked on the past residences. A message popped up: Access restricted. Then when he tried to click on the case officer, another one appeared: System administrator notified.
Sarmad’s contacts—at least some of them—were listed, so he printed them out.
His phone rang.
“Am I speaking to Agent Blake?”
“…Yes…”
“This is Eugene Carlson. I’m ready for you in Conference Room B on the second floor.”
“Excuse me?”
Hesitation. “I was told you’d be expecting my call.”
The lie detector. Two seconds passed, and Tom was aware he was supposed to be saying something.
“I’m going to need to reschedule,” he said. “I’m on something time-sensitive.”
More hesitation on the other end. “Agent Lyons was pretty specific about the timing here—with both of us, from what I understand.”
“How long will this take?”
“Well, that really depends on you.”
“I’ll be right down.” Tom hung up.
He would never be able to beat a lie detector. They would ask—extensively—about his interest in the case, and he could never lie well about that. The hopelessness he felt as he stood up was almost out-of-body. At the stairs, he thought once again about running out of the building. His forehead was moist, and he’d pitted out his shirt. He even looked guilty.
The Prometheus Man Page 3
