It was the fact that when you were operating solo, without a friend in the world, you got to be the smile. And the train.
Karl had no idea what Tom was after. But whatever it was, it had engaged him on a moral level.
He started reviewing security camera footage of Tom’s escape. It made him uneasy how young Tom looked. That face belonged under a baseball cap, not on his to-do list. Karl put another disc into the player. He fast-forwarded to Tom’s fight with the Marines. The camera was far away and at an awkward angle, but Karl saw a door bang open and Tom come through it. Three Marines turned on him in unison. Tom grabbed the first one—big guy, over 200 pounds—picked him up like it was the most natural thing in the world, and slammed him into the floor so hard the others froze.
Karl hit PAUSE.
His armpits were hot with the moisture that forms right before you break into an actual sweat. He didn’t move for almost a minute. Then he hit PLAY and watched Tom dodge between two armed men trying to sight him. He moved like his world was subject to different laws than theirs. Within five seconds they were unconscious on the ground, and one had been thrown ten feet across a hallway.
A moment ago, with absolute certainty, Karl had known of only one man in the world who could move like that. Now, he knew, there was another.
And he realized, with a growing sick feeling, that now they had two men to find, both of whom had been augmented and were running loose around Europe with an illegal stem cell technology in their heads.
But how did Tom Blake get augmented in the first place?
He needed a clue, something to start with. He thought about everything Tom had said, everything he’d been weirdly quiet about, every gesture. He remembered their conversations—and regretted telling Tom about his wife. It was weird and awful to realize that the first person you’d had a real conversation with in twelve months had just been waiting to fuck you over.
Karl picked up his phone. Marty didn’t answer until the fourth ring.
“Tom’s been augmented,” Karl said.
“How do you know that?”
“I just watched what he did to the blow team.”
Marty didn’t say anything.
“We have to disclose Prometheus to the DoD and the president.”
The silence between them grew.
“This man infiltrated our embassy. Our entire defense apparatus needs to be put on notice.”
“I think you know that isn’t going to happen.”
Karl was quiet for a moment.
“Fine,” Karl said. “I’ll put him down. Then I’m going to find the people who made him, and I’m going to put them down.” He paused. “And if you use this as an excuse to reopen the program, Marty, I’m going to put you down too.”
He sensed Marty’s smile through the phone line.
“Welcome to the game, Karl,” Marty said.
Then he hung up.
Karl watched the rest of the tape. Shots rang out from off-camera. Tom darted behind a doorway and darted back out to shove a rifle stock in front of a downed Marine’s head. Almost instantly the rifle jumped out of Tom’s hands as a bullet hit it.
This wasn’t in the report.
Karl had to rewind it and watch a second time. Tom had saved the man’s life. It didn’t make sense. Traitors were like sex addicts: eventually they all lost their standards. But in the middle of betraying his country, Tom had stopped to save one of its grunts.
What difference does it make?
He’s like Bogasian. He’s too dangerous to live.
The air in the room suddenly felt shared. Karl glanced up and saw James standing in the doorway.
“Did you find anything at her place?”
“The cops were there. Apparently somebody saw us trying to take her.” He paused. “There’s something you need to see.”
“Now?”
James just nodded.
They went to Tom’s office, which was lit up like the set of a photo shoot. Techs were pulling fingerprints off every surface they could. People were going through files with gloved hands. A woman, whose resemblance to Large Marge in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was kind of astonishing, looked up when they walked in.
James gestured toward Karl. “Tell him.”
“Sir,” the woman said. “We’ve only found one set of fingerprints in this office.”
Karl shrugged. “So?”
“So they’re not Agent Blake’s.”
Whatever anyone in the room was doing, they stopped and stared at Karl.
“That’s not possible,” Karl said.
“That’s a fact.”
“So whose are they?”
“The prints don’t match any employee of the CIA. They don’t match anything in the FBI database or any other database we can access.”
Karl stood there blinking, then said in a low voice, “So you’re telling me the chipper young man who’s been coming to work here every morning, getting to know everyone while he accesses and steals our nation’s secrets, is actually not an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. He’s a John Doe, and one we have absolutely no way to identify. Is that correct or have I perhaps missed the pony in this pile of manure?”
No one said anything.
“Where is the real Agent Blake? Is there even an Agent Blake?”
“He’s in Africa,” James said. “There’s nothing in the system because his assignment was non-official. But the home office confirmed it—he’s been in Djibouti for the last three months.”
CHAPTER 13
An identification. That, Tom knew, was the key for any person on the move. But there was a circular logic to all forms of ID. To do anything in this day and age—get a job, rent a car, make a large purchase on credit—you needed a photo ID. Yet applying for a photo ID didn’t itself require a photo ID because if you already had one, why would you need one? So the system relied on place of birth, date of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc., for the application process. As a result, if you knew these things about another person, then as far as the government was concerned, you were this person.
This was what allowed Tom to do something that on paper sounded impossible: steal the identity of a CIA agent. But crazier things had happened, he figured: you just had to be desperate enough to try.
When he was researching the CIA, the Valerie Plame scandal had shown him the extent to which the CIA used front companies to place agents. Plame was a Beltway energy analyst and mother of two who’d been outed as a non-official cover CIA agent by a member of the White House staff. In the resulting media furor, a huge amount of information about the way the CIA operated was disclosed—for those willing to read between the lines. Allegedly, hundreds of agents had used the same company that Plame had as a cover: Brewster Jennings & Associates. What Tom couldn’t believe was how thin Brewster’s veneer as a real operating company was. It was basically an address, a phone number, and a Dun & Bradstreet credit report. After the scandal, an anonymous source even commented on this, noting that Plame only used Brewster as part of her cover while in the United States. When she was abroad, she used something “more viable.” Tom realized that this change from shallow front to something “more viable” was the point of transition where he could insert himself.
He’d been living alone in a studio apartment off Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, DC, for nine months at that point. Two weeks earlier, an idea—the idea—had come to him: he could bring the men who killed Eric to justice, and he could stop whoever had augmented him from ever doing it to anyone else again. Other than a clerk at Safeway and an eighty-five-year-old neighbor whose evening walks sometimes coincided with his own, Tom hadn’t spoken to another person in at least a month. Is this totally insane? he wondered. Have I finally gone crazy? But then another thought came to him:
Where else do you really have to be?
He’d been working sporadically—temp jobs, catering. He even did a little work on construction sites where he was the only white guy and the others stared at
him with looks that said, And where did you go wrong? The money covered rent most of the time. His expenses beyond that were minimal. For food, he ate whatever was cheapest per calorie: peanut butter, lots of peanut butter, ground beef, potato chips, white bread, vegetables (on manager’s special). He had $80,000 in the bank from his parents, which he hated to touch. It was one of the only possessions of theirs that he’d hung on to. The other three being: his mother’s wedding ring, every scrap of paper he’d ever found with his parents’ handwriting, and a plastic butter tub from the 1960s. It was funny how only the most everyday objects remained static-clung to a person’s memories. The tub belonged to their dad, and Tom had a ridiculous affection for the thing. Their dad kept cornstarch in it, which he used to powder his crotch with a little mitt after every shower. It was something Tom and his brother found so bizarre as kids that they’d crawl, giggling, into the bedroom to watch. And this practice stopped only when, one day, their dad spun on them, brandishing the mitt like a butcher knife, and chased them through the house, insisting everyone pull down their pants and “freshen up.”
Tom knew he could go back to college, get a good job. He was smart, and he’d always been able to teach himself anything. An autodidact, that was what his teachers said he was. But when he projected himself ten years into the future, sitting in an office somewhere, he still saw himself alone. An impressive job could fulfill his every material need, but not do what he really wanted. It could never give his life meaning. Never give him the people who made that meaning possible, and then kept it alive in you. And so the question never went away: Where else do you really have to be?
Everything he needed to learn came from the internet. What he couldn’t find on the internet itself, he learned from people he met on it. For $100, an ex-thief taught him how to pick just about every kind of lock there was, even the new ones with security pins that took twenty seconds to open instead of ten. “Locks,” the man explained, “exist to keep honest people from temptation. You need to start thinking of them as purely symbolic.”
Tom contacted a frequent commenter on a gun-talk forum, a fifty-seven-year-old ex-Marine whose wife had died recently and who was more than happy to teach Tom to shoot so long as they could talk for an hour afterward in the parking lot about the man’s daughter (“A woman should never marry a man more than 30 percent dumber than she is.”), Obamacare (“If Obamacare was a physical object, it’d be a fist colliding with my perianal area as my mother-in-law force-feeds me broccoli”), and Tom’s marital status (“A quiet guy like you needs a good woman or you’re going to wind up in a bell tower, sighting civilians”).
The internet connected Tom to all the lonely people who saw a young man without a family and were eager to help. Individually their knowledge was valuable. Collectively it could have brought down a government.
First he camped out on Dolley Madison Boulevard until he found men who resembled him driving from the direction of the George Bush Center for Intelligence. Then he broke into their homes, learned their names, and narrowed his candidates down to those who were listed as officers of companies registered in Delaware. These were the agents who’d be using a company for cover. When one of them—an agent with the same first name as his—didn’t come home for a week, Tom broke into his apartment a second time.
He found a social security card, a utility bill, and information that led him to the agent’s mother and ultimately via Facebook to her maiden name. Now he had what he needed to get a birth certificate. The first three digits of a social security number are determined by the zip code of the applicant’s mailing address. So the social security card told him what state the agent was born in and thus where to apply. He used the birth certificate to get a driver’s license. And once he had that, he was able to get a passport for Tom Blake—but with his own picture. He didn’t know how long Agent Blake would be gone, but he was fairly certain that if Blake was traveling undercover, it would be known only to his immediate superiors, and for security reasons it wouldn’t be input into any central database. That meant he could be this man until someone realized there were two Tom Blakes in an organization with more than twenty thousand employees.
When he arrived in France as Tom Blake, he’d already called ahead to let the embassy know he was coming. He showed them his ID, and after they’d confirmed his identity and established he wouldn’t be running any ops in-country, they honored his request for an office to use for a few weeks. Three days after that, he’d connected with the lab tech and stolen his log-in and password.
He’d known it was only a matter of time before he got caught, which meant he’d need yet another identity. So on the corner of Clauzel and Martyrs, he found Adrien Michel, a homeless man about his age. Posing as a UN employee gathering demographic information, Tom got a birth date, place of birth, full name at birth, mother’s maiden name, everything he needed to send to the Office of La Mairie for a birth certificate. Tom didn’t even need to go to the office himself. Despite their reputation for customer service, the French really couldn’t have made the whole process more pleasant. And because he felt bad about taking advantage of a drug addict, he atoned by repairing Michel’s credit history, which had been wrecked by a Banana Republic charge marked 1,875 days late.
As a backup in case the CIA figured out the Michel identity—and they would eventually—Tom found a student at the Sorbonne who also looked like him. He followed him home, waited until he went out for a jog, then picked the lock on his door with a bump key and stole his ID card and passport.
“Credit card, please.”
There was the impatience in the first syllable of something repeated for a second time. Tom looked up and handed the motel clerk Adrien Michel’s ID and the credit card he’d opened in Michel’s name. After leaving the café, he and Silvana had driven a few more hours and then stopped at a motel, the kind that wouldn’t have security cameras. The wallpaper behind the clerk was peeling. The rust stain underneath it looked like a gunshot wound.
“How many is this for?” she said.
“Two.”
The clerk looked at the ID, which had Tom’s picture on it. She started typing.
“I have a non-smoking king,” she said.
“We’d like something with two beds.”
More typing on the computer. “Sorry, that’s all we have.”
“What about a cot?”
Tom looked out the window at Silvana waiting in the car. She seemed small and somehow blank, the way a law-abiding person looks when he’s just been arrested. He turned back when he realized the clerk had said something.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“Just gave out my last cot. Lot of families tonight.”
“Okay.”
When he opened the car door, he interrupted Silvana dabbing at her eyes. He keyed the ignition, and there was a moment where it might have been okay to say something. But he couldn’t think of anything.
He drove around to the rear parking lot and parked front end out. Once he got the door to their room open, Silvana rushed past him and disappeared into the bathroom.
He heard the faucet.
“Are you okay?” he called out.
No response.
Eventually the door swung open a few degrees. Silvana pulled back the tissues on her hand and showed him a long, smiling gash. As soon as she took the pressure off, the wound grinned up blood all over her hand.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
He went down the hall, but the first-aid kit in the janitor’s closet was empty. He looked around for anything else he could use. When he reappeared in the bathroom doorway, he held up a roll of duct tape. Silvana’s mouth fell open.
“I think I need to go to a hospital,” she said.
He didn’t even need to say anything. She could tell just by looking at him that wasn’t going to happen. Finally she sighed and held out her hand. He removed the tissues and examined the cut, then unwrapped a bar of soap and handed it to her.
“
Work up a lather and wash the area.” He turned on the faucet for her.
She eyed the soap. “But that’s going to hurt.”
“Yes.”
“Like…a lot.”
“Yes.”
She waited for him to elaborate, and when he didn’t, she started washing the wound. She didn’t make a sound. She didn’t even make a face.
“I have to make sure there’s nothing in it,” he said. “Otherwise it won’t heal.”
“Okay…”
“I’m going to have to pull it apart to see in—”
“But that’s going to really hurt.”
“Probably.”
“That doesn’t sound like—is that what they do in the ER?”
“Basically.”
“Basically? Now there’s a level of certainty you pretty much never want used in reference to your body.”
“In the ER, they’d irrigate the cut with saline solution and apply some antibiotic, but only after making sure there’s nothing lodged in there.”
“And where did you learn that?”
“Boy Scouts.”
“You were a Boy Scout?” She laughed. “What was your den number?”
“That’s Webelos.”
“What’s Webelos?”
“Webelos are what kids are before they become Boy Scouts. Webelos are in a den. Boy Scouts are in a troop.”
“Ah.”
Tom put her hand in his. Her skin was soft and cool, and it was nice touching it. He pulled the cut open, ran it under the faucet, and looked inside. She sighed in pain.
Now that he was closer to her, he could smell the lemon scent from whatever she’d washed her hair with that morning. As he rinsed her cut again, he glanced at her. A few tiny droplets of sweat had broken out on her nose. She looked at him, then quickly away.
“What is it with men and duct tape?” she said finally.
“What do you mean?”
The Prometheus Man Page 11
