When he walked into Conference Room B, there was an exceptionally thin middle-aged man carefully eating an apple, and Tom noticed the wrappers from his dinner were folded symmetrically in a takeout container. The apple, Tom realized in mild horror, was what this man had saved for the treat at the end of his meal. For him, this actually passed for dessert. He was the absolute last person Tom wanted giving him a polygraph. He looked like the most thorough, pleasure-deferring human being Tom had ever seen in his life.
“Please sit down,” Carlson said.
Tom took the chair closest to the door and noticed every light was on and the air-conditioning was turned off. Even on the level of sound, all privacy had been drained from the room.
Carlson slid a napkin onto the table, placed his half-eaten apple on it, and opened his laptop. They began as soon as he had Tom hooked up to the computer, facing him.
“What’s your name?” Carlson asked.
“Thomas Blake.”
“Just try to relax. What city are we in?”
“Paris.” There was a little drop of sweat right under Tom’s hairline. It was stuck there, tingling against the skin, itching it.
“What’s your name?”
“Thomas Blake.”
“Okay. I need you to calm down.”
“This really isn’t a good time.”
Tom turned his head a couple degrees to hide the sweat from Carlson. All he wanted to do was wipe it off, but that would only draw attention to it.
“Please face me,” Carlson said.
Tom turned back slightly, complying as little as possible. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. He took quick breaths, not to slow it down but to make it beat faster. From what he knew about polygraphs, the test would involve at least some questions everyone lied about. (Have you ever used drugs? Have you ever lied to someone in a position of authority?) His physiological response to those would set a baseline, and if his physiological response to the real questions was higher than the baseline, they’d know he was lying. If he could keep himself amped up enough, it might raise his baseline and mask the lies with it.
But, of course, this was exactly what they’d expect a guilty person to do.
“You have to try to relax.”
Carlson waited ten seconds. The room was so quiet that every time Tom shifted in his chair, the sound announced his discomfort throughout the room.
“What city were you born in?” Carlson asked.
“Louisville, Kentucky.”
“Have you ever stolen anything?”
“No.”
“Have you ever lied to a coworker?”
“No.”
“Did you meet Agent Lyons at the airport without authorization?”
“Yes.”
The sweat drop ran down his face and disappeared into his collar. Tom waited for the next question, but Carlson didn’t say anything. Instead he picked up the phone and muttered something into it.
Tom turned to him. Smiled. “I’m trying to relax.”
Carlson just kept glancing into the hallway. Tom turned and saw a man with an earpiece appear at the end of it.
“You’re off the charts here,” Carlson said. “I cannot test you like this because I cannot get a baseline, you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“If I asked you to take your shoes off, would I find a tack in them or something?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you trying to throw this test?”
“Look, I—”
“Answer the question, Agent Blake.”
“Right before you called, I’d just gotten something—”
“If you don’t answer my question, this test is over.”
“Would you just listen—”
Carlson slapped the laptop closed and stood up and started walking out of the room.
“Hey, just wait a minute, okay?”
Carlson paused in the doorway.
“Right before you called, I’d just gotten a list of men who could be involved in what happened to Benjamin Kotesh. You’ve heard about all the bodies they found in his apartment? Well, I might have to go check one of these guys out…on my own, and I may have let Agent Lyons think I’ve had more time in the field than I really do. I’m just kind of freaking out a little, okay?”
He laughed nervously at himself and then looked at Carlson like he was hoping he’d say something nice. Meanwhile he prayed that what someone once told him about lying was true: the most believable lie is the one that makes you look bad.
Carlson leaned over and tapped the tabletop with one reedy little finger. “You think you can calm down in another hour or so?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, then tomorrow we do this first thing.” Carlson started to unhook him.
“Sorry. I hope I’m not getting you in trouble or anything.”
Carlson waved him off. “It happens. If nobody oversold themselves every now and then, we’d all be stuck in a cubicle somewhere wondering why the phone doesn’t ring. You really need to deal with all that stress, though. You were all over the place on the machine. According to both readings, you were lying when you said your name was Thomas Blake.”
Carlson stared at him.
Then he laughed.
Tom laughed back.
He waited for Carlson to begin packing his things, then stood up and checked his phone. Almost 1:00 AM. He’d only bought himself eight hours. But as he walked past the man guarding the stairs, it felt like all the time in the world.
When he got back to his office, the red button was flashing on his phone. The voicemail was from the tech. Within minutes, he was back in the lab, list in hand, thinking, Please have something, please have something.
The tech said, “We got a partial.”
“What does it work out to?”
“The DNA we just received matches the DNA from the shirt you gave me about 99.9 percent. In other words, we’ve found the first cousin of one of the guys you’re looking for.”
“What’s his name, the cousin?”
“Samuel Nast.”
Tom opened up the file he’d dropped on the desk earlier. It contained brief dossiers on the men whose DNA they’d been able to get their hands on. Samuel Nast had been pulled over in Manchester with a car he’d borrowed from a friend, and the police had collected his DNA. Now an analysis of it had made its way to them.
Nast probably had no idea one of his cousins was a murderer, just as he probably had no idea his own DNA could prove his cousin’s guilt.
An exact match would have been easier—then they’d have their man, and there’d be no need to investigate any relatives. But the odds of that were low. A partial match—that was the name of the game. A partial match meant they had a relative of one of his brother’s murderers, and once they had that, most of the work was done. Within any given family tree, the kind of person Tom was looking for stuck out like piss in your Cheerios.
Tom said, “Pull up Samuel Nast on the system. Let’s check out the relatives.”
The tech read off the computer screen. “We got one. He’s an insurance agent of some kind in Hong Kong.”
“Has he traveled to Europe in the past year?”
“Nope.”
“Our guy travels.”
“Jonathan Nast is one of his cousins,” the technician read off the screen.
The address from the phone in Kotesh’s apartment listed a JN.
“In the last two months, he traveled to Berlin, London, Madrid, New York, and Tangier.” He scrolled down. “Works for Schroder-Sands. It’s a huge pharma company.”
A pharma company. Eric had worked for a pharma company.
“Known contacts?” Tom asked.
The technician started rattling off names.
“What about Alan Sarmad?”
The tech looked up after a moment. “There he is.” He started to say something else.
But Tom was already walking out.
The first man they�
��d matched was Alan Sarmad, but he had been impossible to find. So Tom had focused on the second match, Benjamin Kotesh. But by the time he’d made it into Kotesh’s apartment, six of Kotesh’s men were dead and so was Kotesh for all intents and purposes. So the first man didn’t seem to exist, and the second one had turned up half-dead. Now he had only one lead left: Jonathan Nast.
But that wasn’t all. Someone else was trying to find these men too.
Someone had followed him to Kotesh’s apartment, which meant this someone was probably still following him.
Who?
Who would possibly want these men dead at the exact same time you’re finding out who they are?
And what, other than the fact they murdered Eric, connects them?
He realized he was holding his breath and reminded himself to breathe. Once a week, he’d get this feeling of being overwhelmed by what he’d done, and he’d wonder whether he had taken everything he’d been given in life—the advantages he’d been born with, the love he’d once received—and flushed it all down the toilet.
But then he’d think about things Eric loved to do—like go on walks. Eric had a senior citizen’s affinity for strolling around the neighborhood, speculating as to the various perversions taking place behind closed doors and chatting with the neighbors about their wayward children as though he had raised three or four himself. Tom wondered what the people who’d killed him loved to do. He would imagine them—faceless, always faceless—with a moment to themselves, finishing a beer, noticing a sunset, taking in one of life’s small pleasures.
It was simple really.
He wanted them to no longer be doing those things.
As soon as he left the embassy, Tom got in his car and drove straight to the address for JN, 55 Verdun. He crawled past the dark house, then reversed and parked right across the street. He sat, watching the front windows, wanting to hurl himself through one of them and go hunting for Nast.
He could barely keep his eyes open. His adrenaline had dumped, and suddenly it was work not to fall asleep where he sat. He didn’t realize he’d already nodded off until headlights startled him. A taxi. It slowed in front of Nast’s house.
No one got out.
There was the silhouette of a woman in the backseat. She was looking at the house, trying to decide something. She dialed a cell phone. The dead-blue light lit up the bottom of her jaw and the delicate muscles around her neck, and turned something sleek and beautiful into something strange and demonic. No one answered her call. She got out of the car and started walking to the front door, then stopped suddenly. She was upset, he could tell somehow. She stood there, all done up in heels and a little dress, swaying slightly without meaning to, and he got the sense she’d just come from a club. She scribbled something on a piece of paper and placed it in the mailbox in the same weak, careful way that people put flowers on a grave.
She dropped herself back into the cab. As she leaned toward the driver, headlights from another car splashed light across her face. She squinted, and then as if sensing she was being watched, her eyes locked for a half-second on Tom. Some women had stares that could shrink a room down to their eyes, and it became almost impossible to look away. He held hers and then realized he hadn’t really seen her face.
The back of the car went dark. And in an instant, the cab had pulled away.
As Tom got out of his car, he looked around. The wind was blowing, and the rushes of air made the leaves hiss. A dog barked. Far away, a car alarm went off. There was no one on the street, and no more cars came. He bent down to see if there was a figure sitting in one of the parked cars lining the street. Then he went straight to the mailbox. Her note sat on top of yesterday’s mail. He took it back to the car and unfolded it:
Your phone’s been off. Now it says your number is out of service. I’m kind of freaking out. Can you please let us know you’re okay?
Love,
S
He went to rip up the note, but suddenly he didn’t want to touch it. He hated it, the thought that there were people out there who could care this much for someone like Jonathan Nast. It was one of those thoughts that grew, though you wished it wouldn’t, into a truth about the world. And truths like that only came late at night, only when they could make you the most alone.
He sat there for a few minutes, getting himself straight, and then started to get out of his car. He froze. There was movement in the rearview mirror. Another car crawling past the street he was on.
Its lights were off.
He pried the plastic paneling off the frame of the car door and grabbed the Glock he’d hidden against the metal frame inside. He cut across Nast’s lawn and peered in the windows. A light was on in the hallway, but otherwise the house was dark. This might be his only chance to find Sarmad. He decided to go in off the cuff, which was desperate and stupid, but then these were the qualities that had gotten him this far.
He stuck a tension wrench he’d made from a windshield wiper blade into the keyhole of the front door and twisted it slightly, creating a ledge in the tumbler. With his pick, he pushed up the pins inside the lock until they cleared the tumbler and, as a result of the ledge, couldn’t fall back in. The lock twisted.
He pushed the door open a foot, letting in as little street light as possible, and slid inside. Equal parts fear, excitement, and hatred pumped through his veins. He stood, listening, trying to decipher each of the little noises that fill a house. He made his way to the kitchen, then to the darkened bedrooms. The beds were all empty.
In an office, there was a metal box with a padlock. He returned to the kitchen, emptied out a beer can, and cut a tear-shaped shim out of it with a butcher knife. As he yanked on the padlock, he worked the shim deeper and deeper into the space between the shackle and the lock until the lock sprang. When he opened the box, there was nothing inside.
He turned and looked at the black file cabinets in the office. These had radial locks, which he didn’t have time to deal with, so he tipped the cabinets over and hacked out the backs of them with the butcher knife. They were also empty.
Was this guy going somewhere or had he already gone?
He pushed the file cabinets back against the wall. As he left, a cell phone started ringing. He froze. The phone went to voicemail. He kept waiting. Still no one came for it.
The phone was sitting on the kitchen counter. He went over and saw it had a protective case. Probably wasn’t a drop phone. Which meant Nast might not have left for good yet.
Outside Tom got in his car and waited. He’d give it until morning. If Nast hadn’t appeared by then, he’d bring Karl here and see what the CIA knew. He now had—what?—seven more hours as Agent Blake. Then they’d know the truth, and he’d become one of those people you see on the evening news who are so screwed, you kind of hate them for it.
With his hands still on the wheel, he slumped against his knuckles, exhausted. He thought of his brother, and the thought made his heart a drain that nothing would ever fill.
He was sixteen at the time. His brother was a senior in college.
A few hours after their parents’ car collided with an eighteen-wheeler on Interstate 90 outside Billings, Montana, a police officer had come to the house. He told them what happened and stood there waiting for them to cry. But there was no way either one of them was ever going to do that in front of him.
“Is he okay?” the officer asked Eric, looking at Tom. “Doesn’t he speak?” Tom’s eyes were fixed on some trees at the edge of their property. He couldn’t bring himself to meet the officer’s gaze.
“I don’t think he’s there yet, Officer.”
“You’re not his legal guardian. He’s going to have to speak to someone.”
Eric could tell all his brother wanted was to be alone, just the two of them.
“It’s just that…” Eric lowered his voice. “He’s special, Officer.”
The officer made one of those surprised O’s with his mouth, and Eric touched Tom on the head as if to say, Se
e, the poor thing’s so special he doesn’t even know we’re talking about him. And so Tom was spared, at least that night, from some stranger’s questions and sad smiles and sympathetic looks.
That was Eric. He was the broker between Tom and the rest of the world. He was the one who gave everyone else the energy and the curiosity to know Tom, who was, as their father put it, “this ghost of a little boy.” All brothers share a connection because they are versions of each other. And Tom’s version needed Eric—though Eric’s probably hadn’t needed his.
That summer Eric was a rising senior at Johns Hopkins. In August he moved them in with friends living off-campus. He was methodical about creating a life for them that was theirs alone. They would go to dinner, just the two of them, at least four nights a week. Eric got a car and came up with ridiculously time-consuming errands for them to run together all over Baltimore. Somehow he’d pay for trips home on holidays, even though it felt less like home each time.
First, they stopped seeing their aunt when they visited. Then they stopped seeing their parents’ friends. Everyone just ran out of things to say. They still hung out with their old friends, but without the adults, there was no connection to the past. And since he and Eric weren’t moving back, there was no connection to the future either. So they just floated from party to party, basement to basement, moving like a hole in time.
At the end of the night, when everyone else went home, they’d go back to their motel. They’d both lie there, arms folded behind their heads, and talk about things they couldn’t tell anyone else. Or they’d watch TV and crack themselves up making comments about doomed attempts by drivers to escape the police (“The alley has fooled no one! We’re watching you on Skycam!”) or about the dialogue in ’80s horror movies:
Girl: Stop it, Charlie.
Charlie: Jeez, babe, I only want to show how much I love you.
Other than blood, Tom didn’t know what the difference was between a brother and a friend. He didn’t know why the word “brother” felt so fragile in his throat. But he knew, from the way Eric would always find an excuse to pat him on the back as they got ready for bed, that these nights meant everything to him too. And that not having these nights, not having this place to go together, would mean not having anything.
The Prometheus Man Page 4
