The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  When he reached his car, he noticed a van double-parked at the mouth of an alley. No one was inside, but the engine was running. He walked to the intersection and looked down the alley.

  Two men were struggling with a woman.

  Tom ran toward them. The men didn’t see or hear him because the woman was kicking and screaming.

  “You’re not police!” She sucked in air, about to yell louder.

  The first man covered her mouth while the second uncapped a syringe. The woman froze, eyelids squeezed shut.

  Tom grabbed the hand with the needle and pulled the man’s arm back until there was the sound celery makes when it snaps in half. He palmed the man’s skull and accelerated it into the alley wall. The man’s head hit the brick and bounced off it.

  Tom spun on the second man, whose arm was elbow-deep in his jacket. He started to pull out a gun. Tom kicked him in the knee, hyper-extending so far it bent backward like a dog’s. As the man fell, Tom swung his fist into his temple.

  With both men on the pavement, Tom looked around. They were alone.

  He turned back to the woman, who’d been thrown to the ground and was picking herself up. She was wearing a fitted flannel shirt and skin-tight jeans with designer rips in the thighs. Even with her hair matted to her face, he could tell she was attractive. She was one of those people you knew was going to be great-looking even if you only saw them from behind.

  She seemed to sense someone was standing there.

  “I haven’t seen your faces,” she said. “Just go.”

  “Are you Silvana?”

  She looked down at the two men on the ground. All she said was, “Oh. Nice.”

  “Is your name Silvana?”

  She didn’t say no.

  “We need to get out of here.”

  She pointed at the men. “Wait, did you do this? For me?”

  “Yes—”

  “Thank you,” she said, still dazed. “That was so nice.”

  Gently he took her arm, and she followed him back to his car. When he opened the door for her, she planted her feet.

  “More of those men will be here soon.” He tilted his head toward the alley. When she didn’t say anything, he reached for her arm.

  She jerked away. “I’m thinking!”

  Two Peugeots peeled around the corner. Silvana looked at the cars, then at him, said, “Shit, shit,” and pushed past him into the car, giving him a look that said: And why the fuck are you just STANDING there?

  The Peugeots spread out, trying to block them in.

  Tom dropped into the driver’s seat, twisted the wheel, and stomped the accelerator. The wheels spun so fast they couldn’t grip the pavement. The Citroën floated away from the curb and through a 180-degree turn on liquefied rubber. When it hit a parked car on the other side of the street, the tires caught, and they shot forward, scraping between the Peugeots.

  Tom turned onto another street, then another, trying to put a maze between them and him. That worked for maybe twenty seconds. Then both cars streaked into his rearview mirror.

  He dropped a foot on the accelerator and fishtailed badly around a rotary. His car swung toward a crepe stand. There was a moment when the momentum almost had them. But then the tires caught, and the car slingshot down a narrow side street.

  The first Peugeot negotiated the turn low and even. In fact, it gained on them. The other spun out completely. Its flank slapped the curb, popping the rear tire.

  The remaining car grew bigger until it filled Tom’s rearview mirror.

  Then its grille disappeared from view, and it collided with the back of his car. The Citroën slid around on its cheap suspension. Tom took another turn into an alley. The right side of the car dipped a foot as the left side rose up. It was like driving a water bed.

  They were coming up at a ninety-degree angle on a wide street ahead. The road was clear except for a row of cars sitting in the rightmost lane—the one they were approaching at fifty miles per hour.

  Tom saw a space between two stopped cars. Maybe four feet apart.

  The Peugeot was coming back at them. Tom accelerated, aiming his car for the little sliver of open real estate. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Silvana look at the space he was aiming for, then at him. Her mouth formed an O, and she reached up for what his uncle used to call the “oh shit” handle.

  As they shot the gap, they struck the cars on either side of them. The cars’ bumpers cut into the side of the Citroën and scraped along it like knives.

  Their car shot across the street.

  A stone wall loomed just thirty feet ahead.

  Tom hit the brakes and spun the wheel, but the car slid out and side-swiped the wall. Silvana’s window was down. Her hand came off the handle and was gouged by something. She cried out. When Tom looked over, she was sucking on the edge of her palm.

  He accelerated down the street and merged onto the E50 highway. He was trying to figure out what he should say to her, when the driver of the Peugeot pressed the nose of his car against the back of theirs and accelerated. Their car surged forward like it had caught a wave. As they passed ninety miles per hour, the engine of the other car got louder. Both cars kept accelerating together.

  At 120 mph, it felt like they were in a free fall.

  Tom could feel the tires start to slip. If he turned the wheel, he’d flip the car. They started passing cars so fast the cars almost looked stationary.

  A little blue Renault hatchback came into view. Then they were colliding with the back of it.

  The impact launched Tom and Silvana at the windshield, but their seatbelts saved their faces from the glass. The little Renault shot forward diagonally, out of the way, and Tom saw its entire back side had caved in.

  The Peugeot behind them hadn’t slowed. It kept forcing them forward. That was when Tom saw the turn ahead. There was a guardrail running alongside the highway, and he realized the other driver intended to spear them into it.

  Both cars were still picking up speed as they went into the rail. Right before impact, Tom turned the wheel to hit it at a glancing angle. The left headlight popped on the steel barrier, and the car rocked side-to-side with all its weight. For a moment it almost slid out of his control.

  They careened back into traffic. Tom waited until the Peugeot tried to ram them again. Then he swerved hard to the right lane. The Peugeot’s momentum carried it forward, alongside their car.

  Tom twisted the steering wheel left, pushing the Peugeot across the breakdown lane and pinning it against the rail. Sparks flew up in a seven-foot rooster tail of light. The driver shielded his face with one hand and steered with the other. It took him a few attempts, but then he used the greater weight of his car to push them back into a center lane.

  They were approaching an overpass, and for a brief moment, neither of them tried to maneuver against the other. Tom glanced at the driver, who stared back at him with eerie neutrality. Tom noticed the man’s hands flex around the steering wheel. His body tensed.

  And Tom knew what he had to do.

  He took his foot off the accelerator. At 130 miles per hour, the car lost speed like he’d just tapped the brakes. His front bumper fell back next to the Peugeot’s rear bumper. They were reaching the top of the overpass. The other man jerked the wheel toward Tom, and Tom did the same toward him. The front of the Peugeot went right, the back went left, and the Peugeot helicoptered off the road.

  As it mowed through the guardrail, the posts anchoring the rail ripped out of the ground. The Peugeot kept spinning, tires screaming, and vanished as it fell off the side of the overpass.

  Tom couldn’t believe how perfectly the guardrail had failed to do its job.

  He glanced at Silvana. She was staring at him like she’d been about to ask a question and gotten stuck.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  CHAPTER 10

  Bogasian’s eyes shot open. He sat up in bed and looked around.

  Once he�
��d showered, he ate and got dressed. Afterward he sat on the couch. Sounds of traffic came in through the window. A woman with a little boy in the next room was shouting at someone about how honesty was the only thing separating mankind from the animals. Her voice, like the traffic outside, came in suffocated through the walls. Eventually her words turned to sobs, and then there was the sound of someone laughing.

  Bogasian listened quietly for almost two hours. Then it was time.

  The lab was in a high-rise filled with doctors’ offices. Bogasian took the service elevator and waited by the back door until one of the doctors let him in. Bogasian didn’t look at the man or say anything to him. He went to the examination room, took off his shirt, and sat on the exam table without moving for twenty minutes until another doctor came in.

  Bogasian reclined on the table. The doctor moved carefully around him as he swabbed his neck. Then he inserted the needle.

  Bogasian shot upright.

  The doctor was studying his face. They always looked at him, waiting for him to wince when they went in deep. The doctor kept watching him as he put more weight on the needle to push it deeper. Bogasian turned and stared at him, and the man’s eyes skipped over to the heart-rate monitor.

  When the doctor removed the needle, Bogasian opened the bag he’d brought and grabbed his laptop. Then he stared at the doctor until the man let himself out of the room. Bogasian went to the web page of a shipping company and clicked on a translucent icon that wasn’t visible unless you were looking for it. The screen went black. Then words appeared:

  —Are you ready for tasking?

  Bogasian typed: Yes.

  Five hours later he arrived at Jonathan Nast’s home. Police cars were parked scattershot around the lawn. Caution tape was strewn over everything. Men and women in uniform roamed the property.

  Bogasian got out of his sedan.

  As he lifted the caution tape, he flashed his Interpol ID, and an officer waved him through. The front door was closed, and because no one had dusted it for fingerprints yet, he went around back. Two techs were dusting the door to the rear entrance but didn’t seem to be finding much of anything. As Bogasian slipped past them, he noticed the pieces of the lock mechanism. There would be no fingerprints on those either.

  Inside, another officer stopped him. While Bogasian showed his ID, he stared at a vent in the living room. They hadn’t thought to look there yet, and he didn’t plan to be around when they did.

  He slipped into Nast’s office, where a woman was taking photographs. Bogasian waited in the doorway until she noticed him and then tipped his head toward the door. She gave him a look and stood there, fingering her camera. He waited, staring at her, until she spread herself against the wall and squeezed past him.

  He closed the door behind her. As quietly as possible, he opened the closet. The little laptop and the equipment attached to it were still running.

  He could see the cops in the living room on one screen and more cops in the front yard on another. He’d found the equipment last night—Nast had a thing about self-surveillance—but he had left it to see what it had to tell him. He went to the folder with the last twenty-four hours of recorded surveillance and copied it to his thumb drive before deleting it. He then copied twenty-four hours of recorded surveillance from a couple weeks ago—twenty-four hours of an empty house—and pasted it into the same folder. Then he stepped out and closed the closet door.

  Back at the hotel room, he fast-forwarded the video file on his thumb drive until a figure appeared on Nast’s front yard at 2:00 AM the day before. That was two minutes after he’d killed Jonathan Nast. He watched the figure grow larger in the screen as the person floated up to the window, right up against another camera. Bogasian paused the footage, took a screen capture, and hit PLAY again.

  This was the young man he’d followed to Benjamin Kotesh and later to Jonathan Nast.

  Bogasian had been trailing him for over a week, but he’d never seen him this close. He stared at the young man’s face for a long time. Then he hit PRINT and tossed the printout on top of his other file—the one with a picture of Silvana Nast paper-clipped to the front.

  For the next four hours, Bogasian sat on the edge of the bed, perfectly still and silent. It was dark in the hotel room now, the way he preferred it. He’d always been able to see well in the dark. Despite everything they’d done to him, that never changed. But he had another reason for keeping the lights off: the dull ache they caused around his eyeballs.

  It wasn’t light sources themselves that did it. It was reflected light. The sun’s reflection off a car or track lighting reflected in buffed floors. It seeped into his eyes, and he saw things no person should ever have to see. If he could, he just avoided the light altogether.

  Finally it was time. He sat at his laptop, went to the shipping company website, and scrolled across the screen until he found the tiny, nearly invisible link. When he clicked on it, the screen once again went black.

  He waited, perfectly still, perfectly patient. Now that he was at the computer, everything felt so easy and cool and good.

  The screen cast a green pall over the room. For a second, he thought it might be one of those nights where he waited on one end of the line with no one on the other end. He imagined on those nights his only connection with the world was a computer blinking in the dark office of an empty building.

  But little white words materialized:

  —Has the target been located?

  —No.

  A pause. Whoever was on the other side was thinking.

  —Re-task.

  The cursor pulsed while he waited.

  —New target: 100 Boulevard Gén Leclerc, 6th floor. Police guard.

  —Name?

  —Benjamin Kotesh.

  —Shape the scene?

  —No need.

  —And afterward?

  —Resume initial task.

  CHAPTER 11

  Something in the backseat was exerting a gravitational pull on Silvana’s eyes. She twisted around, peering back there for the third time.

  After going a hundred miles per hour, going twenty felt so boring it was like slipping backward in reverse. Tom was able to take his eyes off the road long enough to turn around. The backseat was caked with papers and food wrappers in various stages of biodegradation. Every surface looked sticky. Bodily fluid sticky. The thing looked like something had just been born in it.

  Silvana eyed his wet clothes and copped the plaster smile people use when a social situation does not allow them to avert their eyes or gasp. She gave a long look at the door handle and turned to him.

  “This is really quite a nice vintage car. How long have you owned it?”

  He braked at a stop sign and stared at her. She tried to hold his stare but gave up, probably on the theory that maintaining eye contact with anyone who lived like this could only result in violence.

  As he drove on, he motioned for her purse.

  She looked at the handbag like it was a small animal and she was worried for it.

  “There’s a phone in your purse,” he said.

  “So?”

  “Give it to me.” He thought a moment. “How much money do you have?”

  She considered this and started shaking her head like she’d come to a decision and it was irrevocable. “I can’t give you money.”

  “We’re going to need it.”

  “We’re going to need it? Are you trying to scare the living shit out of me?”

  “Look, I’m not a threat to you. I just want some information.”

  “Who are you?” She was shouting now. “Who were those men? What the hell is going on here?”

  “Those men worked for the CIA.”

  “Oh, of course. And where are you taking me, huh? To a bunker? Are you one of those bunker people?”

  “They’re going to a lot of trouble for you. You need to give me that phone right now.”

  When she didn’t move, Tom leaned over to grab the phone out of
her purse. She jerked the purse up to her chest, taking his arm with it. The back of his hand grazed her breast.

  Silvana gasped, and for a split second Tom could see the terror in her eyes. They both froze, watching each other.

  Tom fixed his eyes on her. “Your phone is broadcasting a signal to at least—”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Right now your phone is broadcasting to at least one radio tower and probably more, which means your position can be triangulated—”

  “If you ever try to touch me again, I will open this car door and throw myself on the street.”

  Tom slammed on the brakes.

  Silvana got very still—right before she bolted for the door. Tom reached across her and held it closed. She fell back in her seat. They sat about a foot apart, exhaling into each other’s faces.

  Tom extended his hand. The way he did it felt like a threat, even to him. She opened her mouth to say something, scream it—her eyes were wild—and he thought she was going to hit him.

  “Your phone,” Tom said. “Please.”

  She forked it over. He flicked it out his window and kept driving.

  It got hot in the car as he merged onto the A86 to double back around Paris. He turned on the AC.

  “Look, thank you for saving me from those guys,” she said. “Now I would appreciate it if you told me who you are.”

  “Why were those men after you?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  They stopped at a light. She glared at him.

  Five lights later, she sighed. “I don’t know why they were after me, okay?”

  “You know someone they’re after.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then it must be you they want.” He knew this wasn’t true, but her reaction would tell him more than her answer. He shook his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t be helping you.”