The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  He picked himself up and limped over to the Mercedes, which had somehow landed on its tires.

  Sarmad was fine. His car was on fire and he was woozy, but he was fine. Then he saw Tom.

  He shot up in his seat and yanked the door handle. Then he saw the gun in Tom’s hands and sunk back in his seat. He made a point of not looking at Tom’s face.

  Tom stopped in the shadows. “What’s in the bag?” He nodded at the thin black leather laptop bag on the passenger seat.

  Sarmad seemed confused by this.

  “You know what it is,” he said. “Just take it.”

  When Tom didn’t, Sarmad reached down for it with both hands.

  “Don’t do that,” Tom said.

  Both Sarmad’s hands flipped up into the air. He waited. When Tom didn’t say anything, he turned in Tom’s direction, still careful not to look directly at him.

  “Why don’t you tell me who sent you and what this is all about?” he said.

  “No one sent me.”

  “Then what do you want the bag for?”

  “I’m not here for the bag.”

  There was a long silence. Sarmad’s breaths became quick and shallow.

  “What do you want from me?” he said finally.

  “I found your DNA on the shirt Eric Reese died in. I want you to tell me who shot him, and then I want you to go to the police and tell them what your role was, and then I want you to die in prison.”

  Sarmad smiled a little. Now he turned completely toward Tom and squinted, trying to make him out. His hand moved off his lap.

  “Tell me what’s in the bag,” Tom said.

  “My car’s on fire. If it blows up, it’ll kill us both.”

  “No, just you.”

  Sarmad didn’t say anything.

  “I asked you what’s in the bag.”

  “Pictures.”

  Sarmad’s hand was now past his groin and en route to the handgun probably stored in the car door.

  “Pictures of what?” Tom stepped closer to Sarmad, into the glow of the flames.

  When Sarmad got a good look at him, suddenly he was animated.

  He clawed at the wreckage, trying to get out, but two tons of twisted metal caged him. His eyes never left Tom’s face.

  “It’s not possible,” Sarmad said. “I saw you…”

  “What did you see?”

  “It’s not possible.”

  Sarmad’s eyes never moved. Even as he started shaking his head, his skull rotated around two immobile white balls. Tom walked closer. Each step he took amplified Sarmad’s shaking.

  “What’s not—”

  “We killed you,” Sarmad said, and he actually sounded sad.

  “Eric. You killed Eric Reese.”

  “We killed you.”

  It wasn’t said in response to Tom or in response to anything. It was just said.

  “I watched you die on an operating table three years ago.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “I saw your body…”

  Tom flashed on himself waking up on a gurney, surrounded by people in paper surgical masks. He was looking around, trying to understand, and that was when he heard the sound of something metallic.

  “What operating table?” Tom said. “What operation?”

  Sarmad wouldn’t answer, and Tom flashed on Eric in Paris, watching him like he was looking at a dead man. Then he was standing outside Eric’s door on the way to the airport, listening to him cry.

  “Did Eric know?” Tom could barely get the words out. “Did my brother do this to me?”

  “…Nast…”

  “Alexander Nast?”

  Sarmad didn’t answer.

  “What did he do?” Tom walked closer, and Sarmad got very still. “What did he do to me?”

  “He told us to get you. And then he gave you the stem cell injections until you died.”

  Stem cell injections?

  He couldn’t believe Eric would be involved with people who would do such a thing.

  “What do they do?” Tom said. “The stem cells?”

  Sarmad looked at him. “You know what they do.”

  “Why me?” Tom’s throat tightened, and he felt wetness sting his eyes. “I was a kid…”

  “Eric was threatening to go to the police. Please—just kill me. Whatever they told you to do to me—please just kill me.”

  “I didn’t come here to kill you,” Tom said. The stinging in his eyes got worse, and he willed himself not to cry in front of this man of all people. “Just tell me how much my brother knew. I have to know.”

  Sarmad spoke in a whisper. “I have money, more than you could ever spend in a lifetime. Please.”

  “Did Nast kill my brother?”

  Sarmad’s hand shot across his lap. Almost instantly he was leveling a gun out the car window. Tom felt a shock in the air as he swung himself down and out of the path of the first burst. He collapsed against the car body.

  Another burst.

  Tom raised his gun into the window and fired two rounds blindly.

  Movement inside the car stopped. When Tom stood up, he saw he’d shot Sarmad in the chest.

  Sarmad was still conscious, mouthing something over and over without producing any words. He struggled weakly against his seat, like a baby fighting sleep. It took him almost a minute to die. Then he just went slack, and his body leaned against the steering wheel.

  Tom didn’t move for a few minutes.

  Flames bounced on top of the corpse of Sarmad’s car. The way it burned against the blackened sky, the colors, it was beautiful in a sense. And Tom thought it was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. In a sense.

  He thought of the space where Eric died. Like that dark room, the countryside around him was a place where no one was looking, and nothing mattered unless you made it matter.

  Three years ago Sarmad had taken an action. But here tonight there had been an equal and opposite reaction. And a principle had been asserted: even though Eric was dead and no one had done anything, his death still made a sound. And if you were responsible, the vibrations from it would find you.

  They found Sarmad.

  The fires were getting smaller, and the scene was getting darker. It was time to move.

  Tom leaned into the car and lifted Sarmad’s hands. They were warm and smooth. He could feel the tiny ridges on the palms. Carefully he turned each hand over. There was no scar. Gently he pushed Sarmad’s body back against the seat and reached across for the black bag. He opened it, but it was full of papers, and there wasn’t enough light to read.

  He was almost too tired to stand, but he had to keep moving. There was now only one man out there he wanted to see dead. But this wasn’t him.

  CHAPTER 22

  Tom limped toward town. When headlights appeared in the distance, he laid out in a ditch until they passed. Two miles later, as the rain started, he reached an old Toyota with mud caked on the sides. It took longer than usual, but finally he wired it. On the way back to the mansion, he tried to think of a story in case the police were already there. But when he arrived, there were no flashing blue lights. There was no crime scene yet.

  The driveway was so perfectly demolished there was an unreality about it, like a movie set. He righted the gates. They balanced poorly on their twisted hinges, but from the road they appeared intact. There was a light in each pillar supporting the gate. He unscrewed both bulbs to hide the tire burns on the pavement. The lawn was torn up with tread marks. There was no hiding that, so he just parked his car in front of the front door and went inside with Sarmad’s bag over his shoulder.

  Upstairs, the door to the study was smashed. Whoever had been inside had taken off. He decided to keep his search simple and start from the ground up.

  The home didn’t have a wine cellar—he was expecting one—but it did have a finished basement. He went from room to room, but they were so bare there was hardly anything to search. He stood for a moment. He had this weird feeling the s
pace down here was different from the space upstairs.

  Almost as if the basement was smaller than it should be.

  Using the staircase as his reference point, he went upstairs and confirmed that the stairway to the basement was in the middle of the house width-wise. Then he got a pen and paper from the kitchen and went back downstairs. From the bottom of the stairwell, he walked ninety degrees right, counting the steps until he reached the wall.

  Ninety-six steps.

  Each step was about a foot and a half, he guessed, which meant that half of the basement was about 150 feet. He went back to the foot of the stairs. This time he walked the width of the basement in the opposite direction.

  Seventy-four steps.

  He didn’t bother to calculate the footage. There was no way the foundation of a home wouldn’t have the exact dimensions of the house it kept standing. He made a diagram on the paper:

  There had to be a hidden room. He cleared what little furniture there was away from the wall and felt around for a switch or a button.

  He found nothing, so he went to Plan B and ripped the shade off a floor lamp. He swung the base of the lamp into the wall and kept swinging. The drywall cracked. Then it crumbled. As pieces started falling out, he hit something. There was a funny sound. He swung the lamp again. Same sound. He tore down the loose part of the wall to see what was behind it.

  Steel.

  An entire wall of it.

  And he didn’t see any way around. It was now almost 10:00 PM. He knew it was stupid to stay this long. He went back to the stairwell and sat on the bottom stair, thinking. Then something occurred to him. He counted the steps to the front of the house.

  Thirty-eight steps.

  Then he counted the steps to the back of the house.

  Only thirty-four.

  There was another space unaccounted for in the basement. He updated the diagram:

  It was possible this new unaccounted-for space could lead him to the original one.

  He found a closet in the basement that was against the back wall of the house. It was tiny, four feet by four feet, and filled with winter clothes. He felt around, banged on the walls. None of them sounded hollow, and there were no latches or knobs on them, so he turned to the wall facing what he hoped was the hidden room and shoved.

  The wall capsized into darkness.

  It slapped on a concrete floor. He froze, waiting for something to move in response to the noise.

  He was looking into a tunnel. The light from the closet only penetrated a few feet. He didn’t like standing there, exposed in the light but blind to the dark, so he forced himself to walk right in.

  His head hit something. He felt around until he found the lightbulb. Then he ran his fingers along the wall until they found a switch. He flipped it.

  A 100-foot row of lightbulbs came on.

  The passageway had a low ceiling, and he had to stoop to make his way down it. At the end, there was a galvanized steel door, newer than everything else in the basement. It had the largest bolt lock he’d ever seen in his life. That made him pause.

  Whatever was on the other side was meant to be kept in.

  With his fingertips, he rolled the bolt in the barrel. It squeaked loud enough to be heard on the other side of the door.

  The door opened on a kitchen.

  It looked like one from the 1950s, except there were fluorescent lights and no windows. He realized now why he hadn’t been able to smash through the wall. Judging from the width of the room, it had to be almost five feet thick.

  The kitchen opened into a living room, which looked like the hand-me-down living rooms people set up in basements for their teenagers. Behind the living room was a bedroom.

  There was something shiny in the carpet. He knelt down and noticed a floor anchor. It was large enough to hold a decent-size chain. He ripped up carpeting and saw the anchor had been secured by expansion bolts with a strange feature: the tops were smoothed over. It’d be impossible to remove them without ripping up a block of concrete floor.

  Sarmad had been keeping people down here.

  They would have been chained up, with just enough slack to get from the bedroom to the living room, maybe the kitchen too.

  But why?

  Tom unslung Sarmad’s black bag and stared at it in his fist. He almost didn’t want to open it.

  He placed the bag on the kitchen table and unzipped it. Inside were profiles on various men, bills of lading, travel receipts. Like the Prometheus files, they provided a lot of data but little actual information. He stopped on a stack of 8.5-by-11 photographs.

  The first few were tight shots of a man’s hands, feet, and arms. He looked like a bodybuilder. In the photos of his feet, there were purple shackle marks around one ankle. Each photo of the man had a stamped number in the corner: 57618443152121735. Tom kept flipping through the photos until he reached one where the man was on a gurney. The way he was splayed out, Tom could tell he was dead. He noticed the Marine haircut: short hair on top, shaved to the skin on the sides.

  He kept going through the stack. There was a series of photos for another man, Asian, short hair, perfect posture, also military-looking, except there was a different number stamped at the bottom: 20865228106670380. He too had a purple ring mark around his ankle. Tom kept flipping through the photos and then stopped—

  The last photo in the stack was of the first man, number 57618443152121735. He was standing against a wall painted institutional green. Tom glanced up and saw he was standing opposite the same wall. But what disturbed him was the man in the photo. He was smiling this all-American grin, and he wasn’t chained up. In fact he looked like someone who’d made it right to where he wanted to be.

  It almost seemed like this chamber served as some sort of processing center.

  Tom gathered up all the photos and went back upstairs.

  He finished his search of the house in the study. Then he sat down at the 400-pound mahogany desk and rummaged through it. After finding nothing, he got up to leave, then changed his mind and pulled out the Prometheus files he’d brought with him. He took a magnifying lens from the desk and ran the glass over the hands of the people in the photos.

  When he found it, he almost didn’t believe what he was seeing. He checked it again. The zipper scar. The same one from his brother’s video. It was on the hand of Dr. Alexander Nast.

  The man who shot Eric was Silvana’s father.

  The phone rang.

  Tom stared at the antique-looking telephone for three more rings before he put the receiver to his ear.

  “There is a man on his way to you,” a voice said. It was the deepest Tom had ever heard, and it was mechanical. Like an engine that could talk. “Move everything immediately. Do not leave it in the safe.”

  Tom looked at Sarmad’s bag and then over to the door of a floor safe. It was wide open. He hadn’t noticed it until now.

  “Do not make contact. I will engage this individual personally.”

  “You’re too late,” Tom said.

  He waited. There was only the buzz of static somewhere deep in the phone line. He thought the other person had hung up—

  “Who are you?” the voice said. The tone was exactly the same.

  “I have everything now.”

  “Do you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You must want something.”

  Tom looked at the picture in front of him. “Alexander Nast. I’ll only deal with him.”

  No reply.

  “Are you Alexander Nast?”

  No reply.

  “Do you work for him?”

  “We want the girl,” the voice said.

  Tom froze. “What girl?”

  “Who are you?” the voice said.

  “Someone you took something from.”

  “And you want it back?”

  “It’s not something you can give back.”

  “And?”

  Tom stood there sweating through his clothes. He knew he sho
uld hang up—nothing good would come from this conversation.

  “You could walk away from this,” the voice said. “Think of your family.”

  “See, there’s your problem right there. You take everything from someone, and now you’ve got nothing to scare him with.”

  “So what we have here is a failure of tactics.”

  Tom’s grip on the phone tightened. “I don’t know how many people you’ve murdered, how many families you’ve ruined, you piece of shit, but you people finally killed the wrong person. And right now—what you did—it’s on its way back to you.”

  Silence on the other end.

  “And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “It’s going to blow up in your face.”

  Tom slammed the phone down so hard the bell inside was still ringing when he left the room.

  The line went dead. Bogasian stood there. That was the longest conversation he’d had with another human being in probably nine months. He found himself wanting to know more about the person on the other end.

  But now he had a location. The man would be gone by the time he got there, but now he also knew where this man was going. The girl had family in Berlin. At times like this, people always went for family.

  So he knew where the targets were now and where they were soon to be. This gave him the chance he needed to locate them. He sat down and mapped several routes between Nice and Berlin. There was one that started close to Sarmad’s house.

  He opened a new window and mapped the cheap motels, all the places unlikely to have surveillance cameras. All the places he would have stayed.

  CHAPTER 23

  Everything was swollen with water as Tom pulled into the motel. There were currents pushing trash down the streets, and water bled off the gutters in thick viscous clumps. It rained like it would rain forever.

  When he let himself into the room, Silvana was curled up on the bed facing the corner, and the lights were off. Water running down the window cast shadows over the room. They circled the wall above her body like ghosts over their victim.

  He shut the door—gently but loud enough for her to hear. She didn’t move, but he heard a sniffle. It was quiet, like she didn’t want him to know she’d been crying.