The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  Karl knew Tom and Eric’s parents were dead, and he thought of Tom cut loose in the world, cocooned in some apartment he never left, surrounded by other young people who were starting careers, putting down roots, moving forward. While they were entering the future, Tom had both feet in the past.

  Karl wasn’t sure how long he stayed slumped in his seat, but eventually something his dad once said came to him: There comes a point in every person’s life where he’s forced to confront the fact that what he’s been is all he’s ever going to be. He can accept it and maybe for the first time in his life become aware of his soul. Or he can get angry.

  Karl got angry. And eventually an idea came to him.

  You’re responsible for one boy’s death. And yet even though you don’t deserve it, you’ve been given a gift. He has a brother who’s going to get himself killed, and you can help him.

  What he couldn’t do for Bogasian, he maybe could do for Tom. He could get him to a doctor or a specialist. Maybe they could take the stem cells out, or at least do something to alleviate the symptoms.

  And what about the CIA?

  He had no answer to that one.

  But there was another problem. If Tom was anything like Bogasian, he was a ticking time bomb. And as Karl cataloged what he knew about Tom, what he came up with was pretty much nothing. He knew Tom’s family was from Bozeman, Montana, one of the states which produced the most soldiers per capita. He knew Tom’s father did something with computers, and his mother taught Sunday school. He knew—from Eric—that the elderly couple next door paid kids to shovel their driveway and mow their lawn, but Tom and Eric always did it for free because their parents told them to.

  Really he didn’t know anything about Tom Reese.

  What do you call a young man with nothing, who’s willing to go all the way for a cause? You call him a radical—if you disagree with him. And if you think he’s right?

  Then there isn’t even a word for what he is. In the eyes of society, there is only order and disorder, and order is better.

  All Karl really knew was that Tom was a little person, some nothing in the grand scheme of things, who’d risen up and done the impossible. He’d come from another continent and systematically hunted down the people who’d killed his brother, and he was willing to sacrifice himself to do it.

  It was something that people just didn’t do. No matter how much, in their sadness, they wished they could. And anyone who could do such a thing was not alive, at least not the way most people are. Because they weren’t doing what living things do. They weren’t clinging to life. They were imposing terms on it.

  These are the most dangerous people in the world.

  CHAPTER 21

  Tom turned up into the bluffs. As the black presence of the ocean fell away, he could feel a charge in his chest. It collected in him like static.

  He pulled up near the mansion gates and parked on the opposite side of the road. There were guards moving around outside. While he waited for the clouds to cut across the moon, he walked to the edge of a cliff and stared down at the Mediterranean. His hands started shaking again, and he let them shake.

  Looking out over this corner of the world, he felt the smallness of his life, but in a good way. He imagined other people had stood here decades before him and thought of their problems the way he was now, and he could feel how circular life was and how for a moment his life had converged with theirs at the same point on the arc. He remembered Eric’s shirt suddenly. He hadn’t been able to go for it when he was breaking out of the embassy.

  After he’d left Paris, days without hearing from Eric turned into a week. A week into two. He called the Paris police. He called Interpol. He thought of people who the authorities had given up on, who were saved only because a loved one never had. So he flew back. But Eric’s apartment was occupied by someone else, and when he met the landlord, there was no history of a tenant named Eric Reese. He looked up the company that Eric worked for, but there was no record of its existence in any country in the world.

  That was when he got the call from the FBI. There was no record of someone named Eric Reese entering Europe within the last two years.

  He spent the next six months on the internet. It was the one resource he couldn’t seem to exhaust. Then one day he found a video on marcosworld.com. The site was a virtual red-light district. Sneering men in pop-up ads exposed themselves and hated you for looking. Women arched their backs under dialogue bubbles that said, Yes, master? There was a clip of a Czech man cutting off his own penis.

  The video showed a young man being executed in Tangier. Tom clicked PLAY.

  After it was over and the screen faded to black, he just sat there.

  Later, after the FBI dismissed what he’d seen, he tracked Eric’s shirt to an evidence bag in a Tangier police station. The remains of the man who had died wearing it, someone the report referred to as Eric Wilke, a British ex-pat from Hong Kong, had already been cremated. Tom was able to buy the shirt because this was Tangier and things were for sale in Tangier.

  He paid everything he had—and got everything he wanted. The FBI and Interpol said they couldn’t use it to solve a crime that took place in Africa, so he took it to a private lab, which discovered the shirt contained DNA from four unidentified men. At that moment, the shirt made everything else possible. The shirt would lead him to his brother’s killers. The shirt would take him to where he stood right now.

  Waves slapped and sucked at the rocks below. Cliffs surrounded them, cutting them off from the rest of the shore. Probably no one in the last fifty years had stood on the sliver of beach he was watching. He liked that. These places weren’t even forgotten. They were never known in the first place. No one had a reason to look.

  But if you did have a reason, you saw them: not just hidden places but hidden possibilities.

  After he found the shirt, he saw what it might—just might—be possible to do. He wanted to rise up, above the smallness and powerlessness of his life, just for a moment. And be, for that moment, better than he actually was and higher than he had any right to be. He knew it wouldn’t last, just as he knew he wouldn’t be coming back. But the possibilities were so great they would scare you—they would ache in your heart—when you made that decision: save nothing for the fall down.

  Tom turned his back on the water and faced Sarmad’s house. It was powerful, this proximity to the man he was looking for. It pulled in his chest like a magnet.

  He got in his car, drove 200 yards down the road, and turned around. Sarmad’s estate was largely treeless and wide-open. He couldn’t sneak up. He’d have to punch his way through.

  He re-gripped the steering wheel a couple times and accelerated up the road. The mansion gates grew in his windshield.

  His car knocked the gates off their hinges. The car tires bit into the fat of the lawn.

  Bullets pecked at the car exterior. Panic fire.

  Tom kept going.

  He scanned the length of the house for a weak spot. He had maybe five seconds to find one—he couldn’t slow down or the panic fire would lose the panic quality. Four seconds. The whole first floor was fortified with brick. Three seconds.

  The front door.

  The brick ended five feet from either side of it. He turned the wheel lightly, but his tires spun on the wet grass anyway. Now his car was aimed at the brick corner to the left of the door. In terms of structural soundness, this was the part of the house most likely to kill him on impact.

  Delicately—so he wouldn’t spin out completely—he turned the wheel a few degrees to the right. It didn’t take. The car slid, still aimed at the corner. So he did the last thing he wanted to do while speeding toward a brick wall: he hit the accelerator.

  The tires tore through the grass and gripped the dirt underneath. This time the car turned when he yanked the wheel to the right. The door swung into view. He must have hit it going forty miles per hour.

  Dust and wood fragments blasted the windshield.

&nbs
p; The crash threw his body forward. Everything went quiet and sightless, even though he could still hear and see.

  The next thing he knew, he was flopping out the driver’s-side window. His car had chewed a quarter way up a majestic staircase. Rubble crunched under his shoes as he got to his feet. He didn’t actually hear this so much as know, in some distant part of his mind, that a sound was produced.

  He’d brought the gun he pulled on Karl in the embassy. He grabbed it out of his waistband. There were so many hallways he couldn’t know where the response would come from. He turned around and around, kept his eyes from focusing on any one thing in order to preserve the wide-angle view.

  Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. No one came running.

  He picked a hallway and made his way to it. A man popped around the corner and raised his sidearm. No time to run for cover, so Tom closed the distance between them—so fast all the man could do was flinch as Tom drove his fist into his solar plexus.

  He swung the hand with the gun into the man’s temple, and the man went unconscious on his feet. Tom turned for the stairs—

  Footsteps.

  A second armed man was coming toward him from another hallway.

  There was a sound behind him.

  He whirled around and saw a third man had run into the living room. The man froze when his eyes, wide and urgent, found him.

  Tom turned back as the man in the hallway rotated his arm around the corner, already leveling his gun at him. Tom grabbed him by the lapels and swung him into the wall. The wood paneling split with a shriek. The other man appeared at the mouth of the hallway. As he raised his gun, Tom grabbed the man lodged in the wall by the hips and swung him like a baseball bat, hitting the second man with the first. Their heads collided, and when their bodies smacked the wood floor, neither one moved.

  Tom glided up the stairs, his feet on the edge of each one, stressing the wood as quietly as possible. The second floor was silent. No sign of resistance. No sign of anything.

  The paneling behind his head exploded.

  He dropped—just in time to avoid the follow-up—and rolled right into another guy’s sight line. There was a shot. Then another.

  It was controlled firing: the guy had a lock and was releasing with intent.

  Tom scrambled across the hall out of fish-in-a-barrel range. He landed in a room with a fireplace and slammed two contoured double doors shut behind him. His fingers clawed at the antique bolt lock. It had been partially painted over. The bolt resisted. But then he felt something in the lock. It wasn’t quite movement, maybe the intention of it. He rocked the lock back and forth with increasing desperation—

  Click.

  People on the other side of the door were shaking the handles. He looked around. He was in a study. A large bookcase ran wall to wall. Hunter-green wallpaper stretched floor to ceiling. The chair in the corner had legs carved to look like a griffin’s feet.

  It would have to do. He smashed the chair, snapped off one of its legs, and wedged it through the handles of the double doors.

  There was a cracking sound.

  The doors heaved inward painfully, like they were holding in a sneeze. They would hold two minutes, maybe three. Tom scoured the room, saw glass doors leading to a balcony. He went out. There was no one on the lawn thirty feet below. He turned: the chair leg in the double doors was starting to split.

  He went back inside and tore another leg off the chair. Then he dropped over the ledge. He hit the grass and slipped but caught himself by going out on all fours. He looped back around to the front of the house, then through the hole where the front door had been and up the stairs again.

  He peered around the corner. Four armed guards stood, swinging the stocks of their rifles into the study doors. Tom waited until the chair leg inside gave out and the men streamed into the room. Then he crept up the stairs and yanked the double doors closed. He slipped the other leg of the chair through the door handles.

  He made his way down the second-floor hallway and stopped at a thick door at the end. Inside, the room was dark with the blue-green glow of twenty or so little TV screens showing live feeds from different parts of the house.

  He noticed movement on one of them—

  A man running across the screen labeled GARAGE 3. He fumbled his keys into the lock of a large Mercedes. Then right before he dropped into the car, he stopped and looked into the camera, like he sensed Tom was there.

  And Tom knew this was the man he’d come for.

  He was down the hallway in a second, down the stairs in another. He slipped on the powdery rubble surrounding his car, righted himself, jumped onto the hood of his car, and ran over the top of it. When he landed on the lawn, he saw the Mercedes turn for the gates. It accelerated so hard it almost spun out. The driver slowed for a moment, allowing the car and its momentum to swing back to unity. Then the Mercedes sped toward the road.

  Tom was already halfway across the lawn. He pumped his arms and went at the car in a dead sprint.

  The Mercedes crashed through what was left of the mansion gates but still had to make a sharp turn onto the road. The car fishtailed and swung to a stop for a second.

  Tom hurled himself at it in that second.

  He sank his fingertips into the space between the trunk and the rear windshield and almost skidded off the back of the car. As he pulled his gun to shoot out the rear window, the Mercedes accelerated and turned toward the stone wall surrounding the property. A few feet from the wall, the driver jerked the wheel left. Tom didn’t realize he was flying off the back of the car until he was already six feet away from it. He managed to tuck his head as his body torpedoed into the wall.

  The impact knocked the wind out of him. His ribs were on fire. When he stood up, he was woozy and his lungs wouldn’t inflate. He gasped on his way back to the house, holding his arms so they wouldn’t jiggle against his rib cage.

  He could breathe again by the time he staggered through what had been the front door. As he came into the foyer, he felt something warm and wet on his arm. He turned.

  Blood.

  He turned farther.

  A man in a navy-blue suit was cocking a knife back. His other hand, a fist, connected with Tom’s nose. Everything went white. When Tom slipped on the pieces of the wall scattered on the marble, the man punched him a second time, chopping him down to the floor.

  Through little blurs, Tom could see the man’s legs. As soon as he saw the right foot pivot, he slammed his heel into the ankle bone just above it. The ankle seemed to shoot off the top of the man’s foot as it twisted.

  Tom rose up.

  The man lunged at him, carving the air around his face. Tom feinted back and shot his hand up. He caught the man’s wrist in mid-air. The man looked at Tom’s hand like he couldn’t understand how it had gotten there.

  Tom grabbed the man and raised him high above him. When he slammed him down, the floor seemed to rise up around the man’s body. Afterward the man just lay there, buried three inches deep in the wood.

  Tom stood for a moment, trying to catch his breath. When he staggered over to his car, he saw the rear tires were off the ground. He went to the rear bumper, lifted the back of the car, and walked it out from the house. The tires hadn’t popped—he’d gotten lucky—and when he tapped the wires together, the engine sputtered to life.

  He drove after Sarmad, who had a minute on him. The road was narrow and winding. Sarmad would top out at sixty miles per hour in that big sedan.

  Tom went eighty. He zapped through sleeping villages, black expanses. He skidded onto the shoulder a few times but never touched the brakes. He figured the differential in their speeds was twenty miles per hour, so every minute he was gaining a third of a mile.

  He shot for three minutes. It took him four and a half, but when he caught up with the Mercedes on Avenue Tourre, it was going sixty-five, not sixty.

  Tom punched it to 100 miles per hour on the downslope of a hill and hit the back of Sarmad’s car in what felt like a
dead fall. Sarmad’s tires slipped left, then right, before he regained control of the car. Tom rammed it again, and the tires slipped—but less this time. Sarmad was learning. He turned onto a deserted service road that intersected with Diables Bleus. He was taking them away from the settlements dotting the shore and going higher into the hills.

  Sarmad took a right on an unmarked road. Tom made the turn and almost spun out. Sarmad took another turn, and the new road regressed under them quickly—pavement to gravel to dirt. Then it narrowed. Tom tried to maneuver to Sarmad’s side to hit his car and put his rear tires in a slide, but there wasn’t room.

  They came up on a large hill jutting into the night. The road wrapped around it. As the Mercedes disappeared around the side, Tom turned right—straight up the hill. He crashed through a wire fence. It caught on his fender, and he had to shake the wheel to ditch it.

  The hill was steep, and as he accelerated up, he lost sight of everything except the sky. He gripped the wheel, bracing for whatever he might run into.

  The world swung back into view.

  As he crested the hill, he could see Sarmad’s car down below. He coasted down, gaining speed. His line on Sarmad was perfect. They were going to meet.

  Seconds before impact became a certainty—

  Sarmad looked to the right.

  He threw his hands up as Tom T-boned his car.

  There was no single distinguishable sound. Except for a second, the whole world was sound. It filled Tom’s head until he couldn’t see. Vibrated his body until he couldn’t feel.

  Tom was staring at the hillside through what used to be the windshield. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been doing this. He tried to move, but his intentions couldn’t seem to connect with any part of his body. He waited until the tickle in his leg grew into mild agony. Inch by inch, his body came back to him. Five minutes later he slipped out of the car onto damp grass.