The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  “You haven’t really given me much to go on here.”

  “If you can’t find Bogasian or Tom Reese, then you need to find Alan Sarmad or Dr. Nast.” Marty started to walk away, then circled back. “I don’t care what you have to do, or who you have to lean on, but these people need to be dealt with. This is why I brought you back. I don’t want some dickless, well-intentioned analyst trying to do his best. I want you to do your thing.”

  Marty walked out.

  Karl went back to his office, thinking. The news report was terrible, but it wasn’t without intelligence value.

  Now we know why Kotesh had all that security with him and why Nast was holed up in his house. They must have gotten wind of the fact the authorities were searching for them. And they’d known how well it’d go down with their new employer, whoever that was.

  Now Sarmad is next. After they see this, they have to kill him.

  As Karl walked over to his desk, James was waiting in his office.

  “We got something,” he said. “I found some receipts on Nast’s hard drive, sir. They’re for a place in London—Ravi’s Self-Storage.”

  Karl sat down and rocked steadily in his chair.

  “You told us to flag Schroder-Sands if it came up in anything,” James said. “Well, a subsidiary of Schroder leases a warehouse right down the street. The warehouse burned down yesterday.”

  Karl stopped rocking.

  He’d flagged Schroder not because he wanted to find anything more but because he didn’t. Schroder-Sands had no reason to continue showing up because it shouldn’t still be connected to Prometheus three years after the program had been liquidated. And yet Jonathan Nast had claimed to be a representative of the company just a month ago.

  “Look,” James said, “I know the connection between Schroder and this self-storage place is thin—”

  “Everything we do is thin.”

  “You want to know what the London police think about the warehouse fire?”

  “Not really. Cops are just janitors with guns.”

  “Cops don’t carry firearms in England.”

  “You’re not exactly raising my opinion of them.”

  “They think it was the work of animal rights activists, protesting Schroder’s testing on rhesus monkeys.”

  Karl smiled. If he were a cop, he’d probably have thought the same thing.

  “Where’d you get this?” he said.

  “A friend from my Cambridge semester abroad. We used to play squash. Want me to go to London?”

  “No, but send me the address for the storage place.” Karl picked up the phone. “Nice work.”

  James excused himself.

  Karl deleted the video file of Tom’s engagement with the Marines. Then he took a pair of scissors and destroyed the hard drive the file had been on.

  A few hours later he headed out to catch the 6:13 PM train to London.

  CHAPTER 17

  Tom waited for Silvana by his car, alternately looking at the yachts going into Le Port and the women on Nice’s stone beach. He could never in his life have imagined a place like this. Frenchwomen aged seven to seventy were sunning themselves wearing only string-bikini bottoms. Everywhere he looked, he saw breasts—breasts beginning to rise, breasts beginning to fall. Just minutes ago, at a stoplight, he’d noticed a bronze woman adjusting her bikini straps, perfectly unaware of her almost total nudity. And he’d felt like a pervert twice over—first when Silvana caught him and then a moment later when he realized the woman was the same age his mother would have been.

  To his other side was an endless row of cafés, bars, and luxury shops. They were like the rest of the city: no matter how bright it was outside, they looked dark, like they were hiding something.

  Outside the shops, there was a line of Mercedes. No BMWs, no Jaguars, just Mercedes. These belonged either to bored-looking old men surrounded by angry-looking young men or to Arab families without a single article of clothing not marked G for “Gucci.” At one point Tom guessed that everyone within thirty yards of him was a participant in the offshore banking system.

  He looked over at Silvana, chatting with a man at a newsstand. The man had a map open for her and was smiling at something she’d said. He stood watching her. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like, to be so comfortable, to be your best self, around other people.

  He looked away, and when he turned back, Silvana was standing next to him. She opened the map and pointed to Rue Olivier de Serres outside Nice.

  “Sarmad has this huge mansion. It’s along here somewhere.”

  According to the scale of the map, she was pointing to a 10-kilometer stretch of real estate near the water.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now, you’re sure you don’t remember any part of the address? Even a number or two—”

  She batted this away. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  Over the next few hours, he heard this line a lot. When he pressed her for a description of the property, when he asked if anything looked familiar, when he asked her anything at all: “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  Twenty minutes later they were outside Nice, high in the jagged cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean. Eventually they wound their way to a flat remote area about 500 feet above sea level. He noticed Silvana staring at a set of thick iron gates, the kind that seemed like they should have the owner’s initials on them.

  Trying not to break her concentration, Tom pulled onto the shoulder so gently Silvana didn’t seem to notice.

  Her feet were on the gravel before he’d completely come to a stop. She walked a little closer to the gates, then turned.

  “Yeah.” She started nodding. “Yeah, this is it.”

  “You’re sure, you’re—”

  “I think.” The nodding stopped. “I think.”

  She was looking at the next estate, which also had thick iron gates.

  “Just take a minute,” he said.

  “Damn it.”

  “One minute.”

  “It’s one of these two, I can’t remember which.”

  He had to be sure, so they walked to the intercom box. Silvana pressed the buzzer. She waited four seconds, then hit it again.

  The intercom clicked. U2 was playing in the background.

  “Allô?”

  Silvana hit TALK. “Hello?”

  “Allô?”

  Tom intercepted Silvana’s hand on the way to the TALK button.

  “This isn’t the place,” he said.

  They walked over to the second mansion’s gates and continued along the stone wall surrounding the property. Tom grabbed the top of the wall and pulled himself up high enough to look over. A man was on the roof, looking in their direction. As Tom was about to drop back down, he noticed motion sensors in the top of the wall. He ran his hand over one.

  Two more men, bodyguards like the first one, appeared outside.

  Tom let go and motioned Silvana back to the car.

  “That’s it?” she said.

  “It is for now.”

  CHAPTER 18

  All trains rock back and forth, even the Eurostar, which was approaching 200 miles per hour. The rocking put Karl to sleep. Always did. That was his last thought as he let his eyelids close and smiled to himself like a boy with a secret.

  When he woke up and looked out the window, the train was whipping past a gap in the forest. It was flat with bushes the size of a Buick. The moonlight made it all glow with the cold burn of silver. He could never go on a train ride without passing at least one spot where he’d have liked to hit PAUSE and stay—suspended—until he was ready to move on.

  This one reminded him of home, of the brute flatness of the prairie. Either South Dakota called to something ancient in you or it didn’t. It did this at random times in his life, like when he was nineteen, home from an East Coast college, and all his friends—even their parents—were a little unsure around him, so everyone drank to compensate. That night he walked home alone, carrying his shoes, and even though
he was on a street with houses, there was nothing beyond them. And he liked that. He liked that if society’s control over you ever got too much, or if the shit simply hit the fan, you could opt out. You could always run out there into all that wilderness and just disappear.

  He wondered suddenly why he’d left. He knew the reasons at the time: opportunity, career, a one-time chance to do a truly worthwhile thing. He remembered the time he told his dad he wasn’t coming home. For a second he’d seen it in his dad’s face, how much he wanted him back. But then his dad said in a soft voice, You’ll always have a bed here. You should know that.

  After that, every time Karl came home to his family, he was more and more of a stranger to them. Everyone started to get polite. That was the death rattle: good manners.

  Now here he was, on the other side of the planet, about to do ugly things to stop something far uglier from getting into the hands of the wrong people. And the fact was he’d helped make this ugly thing. Being here, he wasn’t doing the world a favor. He was cleaning up his own mess.

  When he was younger, he believed something that turned out to be a lie. He thought that if he did good things, that goodness would last him forever. Before Prometheus, he even felt he’d done some of those things—in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Europe. But it was the classic soldier’s trap. You went away. You did something at great risk to yourself, thinking what you’d done would become a kind of permanent capital, a 401(k) of character, that would carry you through the victory lap that was to be the rest of your life. But then you came home, and a week later—not even a freaking month—as you once again became a job applicant, a father, number 16 in the line at the deli, you realized you were right where you started. You were just like everyone else. And everything you’d done was very nice and very impressive, but it was the past. And the past is never enough to power a life.

  As Karl’s eyes slid shut and his thoughts began to dissolve into nothing, something else occurred to him. If the charges against him were dropped, he could finally go home. But the house in Maryland was in foreclosure and his wife was dead, so he didn’t know where that was anymore.

  Karl jerked awake in his seat. For a second, he didn’t know where he was. There were commands in mid-sentence over a loudspeaker. Door chimes sounded over and over, more urgently each time. People outside were rushing away from the train. No one was inside except him.

  As he got up, he saw he’d sweated through his clothes. He gathered his things, found a cab, and gave the driver the address for Ravi’s Self-Storage.

  The taxi hadn’t passed another car in a mile when the wind and rain started. It was already overcast, but in seconds the world had changed. Turned against them.

  The neighborhoods went from working class to underclass, and the driver stopped braking at yield signs. And as they drove past a dripping swastika spray-painted on a wall, even Karl got a little uneasy—even when he remembered he was white and nominally Christian and technically in the clear on that one.

  Ravi’s Self-Storage was miles deep in an industrial park where all the businesses had closed, some for the night, most forever. And the farther they went, the more it felt like they were leaving the world, not going to a point within it.

  As they passed an alley, Karl saw a trashcan burning. No one was standing around it.

  The driver hunched forward, trying to see through the rain. Row after row of buses and trucks lined the road, their grilles watching it like faces. The only sound over the rain was the timed whine of the windshield wipers. So when the driver said something, Karl didn’t really catch it. He only looked up when the car stopped suddenly.

  “How much farther?” the driver said. He sounded nervous.

  The plexiglass that protected him from his customers was so dirty and ruined with sticker marks that Karl couldn’t see a man in the front seat, only a set of eyes watching him in the rearview.

  He looked at the map on his phone. “About a mile.”

  The driver didn’t say anything. Karl waited him out. They sat there for half a minute before the cab started to creep forward again.

  When they reached Ravi’s, as soon as Karl cracked the door, the wind pinned it open. He got out and hauled back on it until he could stuff it closed. Then he crossed the street looking for an office. The wind was bending a white piece of paper inside a plastic sleeve tied to a chain-link fence. Karl straightened it and read: RAVI’S SELF-STORAGE IS CLOSING. THERE IS NO LONGER CASH OR ANYTHING OF VALUE IN THE OFFICE.

  He slid back into the taxi and heard a beep. A touch screen facing his seat lit up and flashed: AMOUNT OWED: £74.67.

  He slipped two £50 notes into a change holder in the plexiglass divider. There was a pause, and then two cigarette-stained fingers fished them out.

  “I’ll give you another hundred when I get back,” Karl said.

  Ducking his head, he ran across the street.

  Ravi’s was a maze of hundreds of purple garage doors and blacktop in between. Karl stopped under an overhang before his clothes could soak through and looked for the management office. When he glanced back at the street, the cab was pulling away. He watched until its taillights disappeared in the distance behind a rise in the road.

  He looked around the area for a gas station, something to indicate the presence of other people. But the only lights were the ones lining the road and the red warning bulbs running up a skeletal tower on the horizon. For a moment he felt how alone he was.

  He kept walking.

  To recap, four men left their DNA on the shirt at the lab. One had been killed in his home. Another had been beaten to death in a French hospital. Now only two remained. One was a man who’d never been identified, and the other was Alan Sarmad. Sarmad was Tom’s only lead, which meant he was Karl’s only lead.

  Bogasian was another story. It was unclear how he fit in. Certainly he was being used under the new program to kill off players from the old program. But why? Why bother to kill such dangerous people? Yes, there was the investigation into Schroder, and, yes, it would lead to Kotesh and Sarmad, but so what? That was Karl and Marty’s problem, not Bogasian’s new principal’s.

  Unless Nast, Kotesh, and Sarmad had helped steal Bogasian from Marty.

  In that case, the Schroder investigation would lead right to the new owners because Nast and the others knew who they were.

  So what does that tell you?

  Whoever was running the new program had something to do with the old program. There was no other way they could have infiltrated it so completely.

  But who could have done that?

  He didn’t know.

  He found himself wondering what Bogasian was up to right now. He told himself to withhold speculation on this, not let his mind run like it wanted to at unsafe speeds. But he didn’t like it, the thought of Bogasian out there—somewhere. He imagined what Bogasian would do to him if he happened to show up here and find himself alone with the man who’d recruited him. Karl knew he wouldn’t even have the right to protest his innocence—because that was the thing: he wasn’t innocent.

  He looked around suddenly.

  Ravi’s Self-Storage stretched out in front of him like a ghost town. The row he stood in led up a couple hundred feet where it split. He put his head down and ran. At the intersection, he looked both ways and saw a mirror image of what he’d seen before: each road was lined with purple garage doors.

  He chose left just to make a decision and get moving. The pounding of the rain made it impossible to hear anything, and Karl kept glancing over his shoulder. At the end of the next row, he found a graffiti-covered trailer that looked like it’d been dropped on the pavement from the sky.

  He tried the door. Locked. He went around to the side. The graffiti there was eerily frank:

   Help me

  The Lord helps those who help themselves, friend

  I lost my job and my wife

  Then kill yourself

  The metal grate on one of the windows was loose. So he worked it back
and forth until he could pull it off and smash the window with his elbow.

  Once he climbed inside, he hit the light switch. Desks lined the walls, and lopsided stacks of paper teetered on top of everything. In the center of the room, there was one telephone that everyone could face and compete for. The desks seemed to be comprised of wood composite and snot, and the wood paneling surrounding them was of the same technology as cardboard. The room resembled the office of a real business the way sea monkeys resemble those primates who play chess with researchers at Yale.

  Karl was gratefully surprised, however, when the filing cabinet still had files inside. There were receipts going back to the time Nast started renting a locker, two years ago. But when Karl glanced at the name of the person who’d initially opened the account, it wasn’t Jonathan Nast. It was an alias used by Alan Sarmad.

  Karl found a key and a foot-long flashlight and went to the unit number on the forms. It was at the end of the complex, facing a field, and it was bigger than the others. There was a regular door next to a twenty-foot loading bay. He unlocked it.

  The wind whistled through the doorway and went silent in the dark.

  He stepped in and moved along the wall, out of the light from outside. He stood there listening.

  A gust of wind sent a faint scream through the doorway. The door creaked on its hinges.

  He clicked on the flashlight. The beam was narrow and tight. He swept it around the room, carving the darkness. He was standing in a storage bay with fifty-foot ceilings. Stairs led up to an office with windows overlooking the bay. As his flashlight moved across them, shadows of office equipment stretched across the ceiling like fingers reaching for something.

  He found a light switch, and as he walked over to it, the sound of his steps expanded through the room, announcing his presence.

  When he flipped the switch, no lights came on. He shined his flashlight up on the ceiling and saw the panels for fluorescent lights were empty. Someone didn’t want to make it easy to poke around here, day or night.