“You’re all obsessed with it.”
“You can fix everything with duct tape.”
“Everything?”
“That’s right.”
She smiled. “Not, you know, everything?”
“Sure. Tools, cars, plumbing…acquaintances.”
“‘Acquaintances’?”
“Yes, you take a piece, and you put it over your new friend’s mouth. Peace and quiet ensues.”
She just looked at him.
He held up the duct tape and unrolled a strip. “You can also tape your new friend’s wrists to the armrests, so she can’t jump out of a car going thirty miles per hour.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“It’s a three-hour drive to Nice tomorrow. You better hope so.”
Her jaw dropped a little, like she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. She cocked her head, studying him from a different perspective. “Wow,” she said, “it has a sense of humor. I was beginning to think you were born of a jackal or something.”
He put some Kleenex between the duct tape and the cut and then used the tape to pull the two sides of the wound together.
“I mean, this is progress,” she said. “Shit, I’d hug you if I weren’t afraid to touch you.”
Then she flashed him a crooked little smile. He noticed her lateral incisor was twisted out of position. It was the kind of little imperfection that took ordinary plastic beauty and elevated it from something in a magazine into something real, into something you couldn’t know you wanted until you saw it.
“What?” she said.
He shook his head, and as he stepped back, he watched the tension release from her body.
“You sure you want me to take you to Berlin?” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s in Berlin?”
“Someplace I know I’ll be safe.”
Who’s there?
“I hope it’s a good friend,” he said.
“It’s not important.”
Is it your father?
He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. He smiled and said, “Okay, but just to be clear, if I take you all the way to an address there and it turns out to be a day spa or something, we’re going to have a problem.”
She didn’t take the bait. Just grinned. “You bastard. I have never been to a day spa in my life. What makes you think I’m that kind of girl anyway?”
“I was kidding.”
“Oh no, see, that’s one of those things you actually mean but you say is a joke when the other person calls you out.”
“You’re calling me out?”
“Oh, I’m calling you out, fucker.”
“Okay. You know what gave you away? Your purse. It’s huge. That’s never a good sign. At first I thought you were one of those women who keeps a little dog in it.”
She shook her head gently at him. “You know, I’d slap you, but it probably wouldn’t do anything except make you angry.”
“Once you show me Sarmad’s house, I’ll take you to Berlin. Deal?”
At the word “Sarmad,” the smile on her face died. Finally she nodded. “Deal.”
CHAPTER 14
Karl was still in Tom’s office when the phone rang.
He’d been going through Tom’s desk and making sure the analysts had looked for fingerprints in every square inch of the office.
Everyone froze and then turned in unison to stare at the office telephone. Karl got it on the third ring. He lifted the receiver to his ear but didn’t say anything.
“Hello?” someone said.
“Yes?”
“Um…I think I have the wrong number.”
“This is Tom Blake’s desk. May I help you?”
“Would you let him know I have some more reports that arrived today?”
“Of course,” Karl said. “Which reports are those again?”
A pause. “Just please tell him to come by.”
“Okay. I’m actually supposed to meet him. Could you give me your address?”
Karl was surprised and also somehow not surprised when the person he was speaking to gave him the address of the building he was standing in. Once they were downstairs, in fifty words or less, Karl terrorized the lab tech into immediate compliance.
“The samples came from all over Europe,” the tech said. “British police, German police, Interpol, other agency people. We got our first match a few weeks ago.”
“Who was that?”
“Alan Sarmad was the guy’s name.”
Karl got a falling sensation in his stomach. “And who came afterward?”
“Benjamin Kotesh.”
“Paris police found him half-dead less than seventy-two hours ago, you know that?”
The tech looked from Karl to James and back. “Wait, you don’t think I knew—”
“What were you matching these guys’ DNA against?”
The tech went over to a small refrigerator and pulled out a paper pouch. He laid it on the table, then picked up a Starbucks cup and backed away like the whole thing was out of his hands now.
Inside the pouch was a blue-and-gray flannel shirt. Drops of blood dangled off the fibers like little berries. Other places, where there was more of it, the blood had smeared. Karl noticed a fist-size stain on the front.
He looked at the tech, who finished his sip of coffee and then raised both arms.
“I don’t know who it belonged to,” he said.
Karl remained expressionless. “What if I said it was your job to know?”
“But that’s not—”
“But it is now.” Karl reached over and gently pulled the coffee cup out of the tech’s hand. He placed it on the table, just out of reach.
The tech was silent, but Karl knew he was going to talk. People in his situation always talked.
“He never really told me anything,” the tech said. “He just brought me the shirt and told me to identify the people who’d come in contact with it. I found the DNA of five men. One of them had clearly been wearing the shirt, but Agent Blake wasn’t interested in him, so we—”
“Who was the man who’d been wearing it?” Karl turned to the shirt. Whoever it was, it looked like he’d died in it.
“I don’t know,” the tech said. Karl stared at him. “I swear to God, he never told me.”
“So when someone hands you an article of clothing literally soaked in another person’s blood, it’s your policy to set aside the personal value judgments and not risk pushing any emotional boundaries by asking a question?”
“It wasn’t my place to—”
“Something like ‘Holy shit, there’s a fucking liter of blood on this shirt. Dear god, who in the fuck does it belong to?’”
The tech’s face hardened. “I don’t ask questions. You know that.”
Karl thought a moment. All this non-information told him something indirectly. Tom hadn’t asked the tech to identify the man who’d been wearing the shirt, which meant Tom already knew who that was.
“I need you to ID whoever died wearing the shirt.”
“That’s going to take a while.”
“What does that mean?”
“Weeks. Assuming I’m only going to be checking US databases.”
Karl sighed. “Okay. Get started. Now tell me about the other men.”
“We got Ben Kotesh’s DNA report from the Germans. He was an exact match. However, with Jonathan Nast, we didn’t get a match.”
“So how did you know he left the DNA on the shirt?”
“We received a DNA report for a man who’d been arrested in the UK and forced to give the police a DNA sample. His DNA matched one from the shirt around 20 percent, which meant they’re relatives, first cousins. Jonathan Nast was the only one we could find that remotely fit.”
“How did you know who Nast’s cousins were?”
“It was in the system.”
“And how did it get in the system?”
“Honestly? I don’t know, but Agent Blake was spending a l
ot of time on Facebook.”
“Jesus.”
“It actually wasn’t that hard—”
“You said there were four men. Sarmad, Nast, and Kotesh makes three. What about the other one?”
“The last sample was never identified.”
Karl pounded down the hallway with James jogging behind him.
“Get me everything on Alan Sarmad,” Karl said. “Every. Little. Thing. He’s Tom’s next target, so finding him may be our last chance to find Tom. Comb through his contacts. Start with people in France, then expand. Get it started, and then call me. You and I are going to Blake’s apartment.”
“I’ll get Agent Blake’s address.”
Karl stopped. “Don’t call him that. He’s not Agent Blake.”
“What do I call him then?”
“Just don’t call him that.”
Tom lived on a gloomy little street in the eighteenth district that gentrification had passed by. When they got the door to his apartment open, the inside looked like it had been empty for years. There was nothing on the yellowed walls, which pushed in claustrophobically on what little space there was. When Karl saw the bed had a frame, he was relieved not to find a mattress with a rifle next to it. The room screamed lone gunman as it was.
“It’s like he never moved in,” James said.
Karl nodded. He didn’t like that their target lived like this. Everywhere he looked, he saw signs of a life lived in the dead end of isolation. It was easy to picture Tom sitting in here by himself on weekends—so quiet and alone, he almost didn’t exist.
The bookcase actually had a few books on it, and Karl’s eyes stopped on a worn copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, which was interesting because it was probably the most famous revenge story ever written. Karl opened it up.
A photo fell out.
It was of two smiling boys, their skinny arms wrapped around each other. The younger one had to be Tom. He was maybe ten, but it was definitely him. The boy next to him was very different, but the resemblance was there. Karl was looking at Tom’s brother. He was older, maybe fifteen, with disheveled hair. Something about him was familiar, but Karl couldn’t place it. He was full-on belly laughing like whoever snapped the photo had just uttered the most perfect, hilarious thing he’d ever heard in his life. Tom was also smiling, like he didn’t quite get the joke but could enjoy it through his brother, secondhand.
Karl smiled—but it died halfway up his face.
Eric Reese.
The boy standing next to Tom is Eric Reese.
Whatever Tom was doing, it wasn’t for money or politics or state secrets. It was for his brother.
Karl felt James’s presence behind him. “Give me a minute, will you?”
“Okay.”
Karl heard him walk out of the apartment and close the door. He stood still, trying to stay calm. Eric Reese had finished undergrad at Johns Hopkins and his master’s in molecular biology a few years after that. He was searching for the next thing, and Karl gave it to him. He recruited him for Prometheus.
The night the chimp got out of its enclosure and killed everyone in the lab, Eric had come to work late. When he saw Weaver had locked everyone in, he fled. A week later Karl tracked him down to a little motel on the outskirts of Paris. When Eric opened the door, he didn’t seem all that surprised. He just nodded, looking ancient, like he’d seen it all and was now utterly exhausted by it.
“Come get a drink with me,” Karl said.
Eric sighed. “How could you want a drink right now?”
“Jesus, how could you not?”
There was a time when Eric would have laughed at that. He was one of those people who was always ready to laugh at everyone’s jokes.
At the bar, they sat alone on one end. It was 11:00 AM, and old men sipped drinks in silence.
“It’s time to come back,” Karl said.
Eric took a drink and stared into the glass.
“I don’t think you understand. People are getting scared.”
It took Eric a minute to say anything. When he did, it was just four words:
“You lied to me.”
They’d told him the same thing they told Dr. Nast, that the stem cells were being developed to cure neuromuscular disease. It had made Karl sick every time Eric told him how grateful he was to be working on something so important to people’s lives.
In some small way, he and Eric had been friends. That was when Karl realized he was not in any way this young man’s friend. And he never had been.
They talked, and Eric had come back because that’s what people in his position always did. He served out another couple of months as Dr. Nast’s assistant and went home. Or so Karl had thought.
CHAPTER 15
100 Boulevard Gén Leclerc was Beaujon Hospital. A wing off the main building was only two stories high. Bogasian ran two steps up the side of it and jumped and caught a gutter pipe that extended roof-to-ground. He climbed hand over hand up to the seventh floor.
The windows were large and indented into the face of the building. Bogasian set his feet and lunged for the closest one. He caught the ledge with both hands and hung there until his weight settled. Then he let go.
He dropped to the window ledge below—the sixth floor, his real destination. When he landed, there was a moment when he could have lost his balance. His body started to drift away from the building, but he grabbed the wood frame around the windowpanes with his fingertips and pulled himself back.
He peered into an unlit room with two rows of bed-ridden people. Cream-colored machines ran wires into their bodies.
He rocked a twelve-inch strip of wood side-to-side until it snapped off, then slipped two fingers over the glass pane and worked it free. He tucked the pane under his arm and reached in to unlock the window. After climbing into the room, he slid the glass back into the frame. Soundlessly he moved out of the light from the window and listened, but there was just the sucking and ticking of the machines.
He moved back into the light, which he didn’t like, and toward the door to the hall. Midway, he had the vague feeling of being seen. He turned—
Someone on the bed was staring at him.
The body faced the ceiling, but the eyes were stretched in their sockets. They were fixed right on him.
As he moved closer, he could make out the decaying old person they belonged to. The teeth were missing, and the mouth hung open. Chunks of hair rotted on the scalp. He wasn’t sure they were even attached to it.
Disgust slid up and down in his throat.
Gently he took the emergency-call cord between his forefinger and thumb and dropped it off the side of the bed. The eyes had seen him. He touched the throat, then put his other hand on it and started applying pressure.
He looked around the room at the others. All of them were motionless, in various stages of decomposition. He looked back at the one he had hold of—
The eyes were shut.
And they had been the whole time. He knew that now, just as he knew the hallucinations were getting worse.
The man resumed breathing as Bogasian eased his head back down on the pillow and pulled the sheet up to his chest.
He went to the door and peered down the hall. One cop was sitting outside Kotesh’s door. Another was planted outside the nurses’ station, chatting up a woman who was way too young for him. The rest of the hallway was relatively dark to help the patients sleep.
Bogasian glided down the hallway and seized the first guard. He clamped one hand over his mouth and another over the base of his skull and hoisted him in the air by the head. Then he backed into Kotesh’s room and elbowed the door shut.
Bogasian left the lights off, so it was still dark as he watched the door swing open. The second guard shuffled in a little but didn’t break the plane of the doorway. Only his head poked through.
It was quiet except for the clicks of Kotesh’s machines.
“Louie?” the guard said. His head craned around, blind in the darkness.
> The guard made his way into the bathroom, feeling around for a light switch. After a couple swipes, he hit it and froze. He stared at something in the bathroom mirror.
Then he whirled around and saw Louie folded into the corner of the room. Louie’s face had turned dark purple.
The guard’s eyes flicked to Kotesh. He was reclined on the bed with the right side of his face caved in. All the features stretched and pulled toward the low point, now his right eye.
Bogasian was standing by the window, exposed in silhouette. He merged back into the darkness.
The guard fumbled with his radio. By the time he got it to his mouth, he saw Bogasian. He tried to get away, but Bogasian caught him by the collar and punched him in the side of the head. He could feel the surprise running through the man’s body like a current.
He pulled the fist with the collar down to the floor, pinning the guard’s head against the linoleum. This time when he hit it, the head stayed in place. The second time, he felt the guard’s skull give a little. Then it gave a lot.
CHAPTER 16
Karl’s eyes shot open.
He’d fallen asleep in his clothes on the bed at the Hotel Lotti. His heart was pounding, and he was trying to figure out why when he heard the phone ring again. He picked it up.
The deputy director of the CIA—a career politician—was already on his way to Paris. Marty had gotten the call with only an hour’s notice, which itself was telling. The meeting would be at 9:00 AM.
Like all people in Special Activities, like all people who actually do something for a living, Karl hated politicians. He hated everything about them, from their creepy-perfect haircuts to the way there was something vaguely unreal about each one. Like someone had broken into a wax museum and, through some incantation, given one of the wax dummies a law degree and a vampiric bloodlust for “networking” and “thought leadership” and “horseshit.” Since he’d joined the CIA, this petty hatred had metastasized into whatever hatred becomes after fear of losing one’s job is added to it. Whenever the politicians arrived, work would cease, and questions had to be answered in this vague corporate-speak which Karl couldn’t pull off without breaking down like Rain Man.
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