“You weren’t always this cocky,” Kay said.
“Quit evading the question,” I said.
Her gaze slid away from mine. “The Chief,” she said quietly, “he feared you more than the others and therefore he considered you expendable.”
That sounded about right.
“Gavin,” she said, speaking louder, “I don’t have much time.”
“Before we go into that, I want to know how you found me. Who else knows I’m here?”
“It wasn’t the Shop,” she said. “So you don’t have to worry about them.”
“Just spit it out,” I said.
“Doctor Harris, he found you.”
“What? How? And why would Harris be looking for me?”
Kay uncrossed her legs and set the glass beside her purse on the box. With her hands folded, she leaned toward me. She gave me an earnest look, and it might have been genuine.
“About a year after you escaped, there was a change of policy at the highest level. The Chief had done something to anger very important people. I think there was a review concerning Cheng, Harris and the others, and there was pressure from the American State Department.”
“You expect me to believe that?” I asked.
“The Americans put new safeguards in place,” Kay said. “It was a political thing. Cheng went to work for Polarity Magnetics soon after.”
“What’s that?”
“The name of a research company linked to the Pentagon.”
“What does Polarity Magnetics have to do with me?”
“Will you let me finish? Quit being so paranoid.”
I glanced at the door. “You talk about a change in policy, but I’ve been hunted on three different continents. There’s never been any change in that. Shop commandos almost got me the last time.”
“There was a change. It happened just as I said. But you know the Chief. He worked overtime and regained much of his lost authority.”
My neck burned hearing that. It felt as if a sniper’s crosshairs were targeting me.
“And you killed people,” Kay said. “You were supposed to slip away from the Reservation, not shove a knive into them.”
“The Reservation” was the Shop name for the laboratory facility near Milan.
“They used big spotlights on me,” I said, “and they fired these blue beams. I had to take them out before they recaptured me.”
“Those guards were Shop personnel, and you know what that means. If it’s any consolation, I’ve heard the Chief wants everyone back on the Reservation. But first he has to—”
“Time’s up,” I said, standing. The heat on the back of my neck had become too hot. I could
feel
someone out there watching my boat. The desire to flee was becoming overpowering.
“This is about Dave,” Kay said in a rush. “I need your help because I think I can save him.”
That stopped me. “Dave is alive?”
“…if you can call it that.”
“He’s the same?”
Kay nodded somberly.
Once, when everyone had been normal, Kay had been in charge of certain tests at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. People used to think those tests would end the world by accidentally creating a black hole or opening a way into a different dimension, with Stephen King monsters waiting on the other side. There had been an accident all right—one that nobody could have foreseen—but the world was still here. Dave had taken the brunt of the exposure, and it had changed him more than it had changed the rest of us.
“I’ve been trying to bring him back,” Kay said.
“How is that even possible?”
“The few times Dave phases in he moans as if he’s trying to speak, trying to wake up. Doctor Cheng believes he’s been communing with others and now he’s trying to warn us of the things he’s learned.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I work for Polarity Magnetics,” Kay said. “The State Department managed to finagle Dave off of the Reservation and bring him to Long Beach where Doctor Cheng heads the division. I’ve been working on the project to…to bring him back. I’ve made incredible discoveries this last six months. Cheng and the others—” Kay frowned. “I can’t let them have this,” she said, tapping the box.
“What’s in it?”
“Insurance.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“I discovered the fundamentals that allowed this thing’s construction. If they had asked my permission, I would never have agreed. The thing in the box, it’s a prototype, and you could say I stole it. The people at Polarity Magnetics are going to want it back.”
“Why did you bring it here?” I asked. “And you still haven’t told me how Harris found me.”
“Harris knows nothing about this,” she said, tapping the box.
“You can’t just walk into a top-secret installation and steal a prototype to some fantastic new weapon,” I said.
“Like you, I’ve gained…
abilities
,” Kay said. “And I never said this was a weapon.”
“Why bring it here? Why involve me in this?”
“Dave trusted you. Long ago, he told me to turn to you if I ever needed help. I’m on the verge of something huge, something that will bring him back. But I need the time to finish the tests.”
“You’re not making sense. If you’re part of a group trying to bring Dave back, why would anyone stop you from making further tests?”
“You have no idea,” she said softly.
“Enlighten me.”
She shook her head. “It would take too long to explain.”
I laughed, and even to my ears, it sounded bitter.
“One more step and I’m finished,” she said. “I swear it. I need the time and the facilities. There are people trying to block me. With this as insurance—” she touched the box, “—I can complete my tests.”
Kay was on my boat. That meant others knew of my whereabouts. Since escaping the Reservation, I’d only wanted one thing: to be left alone. Kay’s presence meant they weren’t going to leave me alone. My heart rate increased as I thought about that. Maybe it was time to go on the offensive and show them it was a bad idea messing with me. Maybe the thing to do now was play along with Kay.
“You’re saying you want me to hide the box.”
“Only for a few weeks,” she said.
“Can the people at Polarity Magnetics track this thing?” I asked.
“My suggestion is that you put it somewhere deep.”
I didn’t like the answer. “What about the Shop?” I asked. “What do they know about this?”
“I’m not foolish. They know nothing.”
That was a lie, and I wondered why she bothered telling it.
“A few weeks,” she said, rising, taking her purse. “On my love for Dave, I swear I’ve been telling you the truth.”
“Sure,” I said, “a few weeks, no more than five. Then I’m putting it on eBay.”
“You won’t regret this,” she said, heading for the door.
I already did.
-2-
I’d first met Kay in Switzerland, in Geneva. Or to be more exact, I’d met her at the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator facility, which was near the Swiss city.
The accelerator was a massive complex that ran through Switzerland and France. It was a giant ring seventeen miles in circumference. Much of the ring was five hundred and seventy feet deep in the Earth. Scientific experiments there were supposed to answer some fundamental questions of physics. For instance, were there extra dimensions as predicted by string theory? Why was gravity so many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three fundamental forces? What was the nature and properties of quark-gluon plasma? And what was the nature of dark matter, the substance scientists believed accounted for much of the mass of the universe. Kay had led the dark matter team.
My journey to becoming head of Security of Kay’s department had been a long and tortured one. It originally involved the Green Berets, in Afghanistan. After the U.S. Army, I joined the Shop, becoming an assassin for them.
I’d learned the basics of killing at Fort Bragg and sharpened my skills in Afghanistan hunting the Taliban. I’d scaled more than my share of mountains high in the Hindu Kush Range. We’d operated some of the newest military hardware there. One of the most lethal had been the M-25, an experimental weapon that was supposed to replace the M203 grenade launcher. With an integrated ballistic computer and a laser rangefinder, I could quickset a 25mm grenade to explode at a precise range. In other words, I used the M-25 to fire a grenade in midair just above a group of hostiles hunched behind a boulder. I rained shrapnel on them.
The Afghanis were tough, with the stamina of mountain goats and a warrior ethos going back thousands of years. In some tribes, a boy had to take his antique rifle and shoot an enemy in the head before he became a man and before he earned the right to marry. The Russians and British had each learned how tough the Afghanis were, to their sorrow. In ancient times, the Afghans had given Alexander the Great his hardest fight.
What did any of that have to do with the particle accelerator in Geneva? The answer was, not much. It had to do with my descent into savagery. The long version was detailed and gory. The short version began like this: I found a good friend in Kabul skinned alive and hanging by his intestines in the apartment of his Afghani girlfriend. What the enemy had done to her is too gruesome to repeat. Something died in me that day, something good and idealistic. I began to do more than just soldier for my country. I hunted the Taliban as if they were vermin. It was a feral sort of madness. I drank too much, felt too little and spilled far too much blood.
How the Shop found out about me, I don’t know. Their headquarters was in Geneva. The first thought a reasonable person would have about them was that they were strictly a European organization. That would be false. The Shop was a United Nations establishment. If anyone was the
men in black
of people’s fevered imagination, it was the Shop.
In my opinion, they had several goals. The first was a one-world government with teeth. The second was manageable technology under their control, and the third was that they remain the arbiters of the first and second goals.
How did the U.S. Army and government get involved with the Shop? I never figured that out exactly. Sometimes I thought the bureaucrats in Washington believed the Shop was an arm of the American government, disguised under the U.N. flag. Maybe that was true some of the time. On different days, I thought the Shop began as a harmless organization that somewhere along the line gained muscle. Then it developed a secret agenda and enormous amounts of information in its computer files. Most of that information was of blackmail potential, with one hundred thousand politicians on their lists.
The death of the Soviet Union back in the Nineties killed the only organization capable of dealing with the Shop on an even footing. I mean the KGB, the Soviet Secret Service. Their best agents migrated to the Shop, giving the organization even greater capabilities, talent and ruthlessness.
My introduction to the Shop occurred one cold day outside of Kabul. My commanding officer ordered me to get into a car with men in suits. They drove me into the city near the government buildings. In the basement of a fortified bank, in a soundproofed room, I met a man known as the Chief. He was short and spare, with a white goatee. He wore a black suit and tie, wire-rimmed glasses and had two moles on his left cheek. A lizard had more expression than he did. The Chief asked me if I wanted to chop off the heads of my enemies instead of just hacking at their limbs.
I wondered who this civilian was, how he had any authority over the general and why we met in a bank’s basement.
He praised me expressionlessly, saying my kill ratios were impressive. He added that I had a facility for the kind of work the world needed doing.
I shrugged, which caused his features to tighten, and it changed the tenor of our meeting. After studying me for a time, he picked up a thin briefcase, set it on the table, unsnapped the locks and took out a single sheet of crinkly paper. He eyed me further as he held the paper. I crossed my arms, waiting him out instead of just walking away. There was something more than a little sinister about all this. Who was this guy? He gave a nearly soundless grunt, set the paper on the table and slid it across to me.
“To save time, Herr Kiel, I will tell you what this is: a short list of your military atrocities.”
Without touching the paper, I studied the list. I knew that I was good at what I did, and these past months I’d killed some dangerous warriors. Some of my methods had been unorthodox. Maybe my ways had been old school, gunning them down in mosques or as they spoke sweet nothings to one of their girls. My buddy and his woman had died hard, so I kicked my boot up the enemy’s hindquarters.
I’d buried too many friends in this wasteland of a country, and I’d carried too many twenty-year-olds on stretchers, with their bodies mutilated by roadside bombs. Sure, I’d witnessed a court martial before. The officers on it had put away good American soldiers for some minor violation of the Rules of Engagement. We all knew the careerist officers on the court-martial panel had been puppets of the Washington politicians. Those winebibbers had considered the combat deaths to have occurred at the wrong time and place for their delicate sensibilities.
By this time in Afghanistan, it had already dawned on me that our politicians weren’t fighting to win. I mean, we let some Afghans grow opium and sprayed herbicide on other Afghanis’ fields. We allowed the enemy sheltered zones and we had deeply corrupt allies. If the monthly bribes didn’t arrive in time, our bought Afghan allies laid down their rifles, refusing to pick them back up until we stuffed their pouches with dollars. For months already, I’d wondered why American soldiers died halfway around the world in a landlocked mountain kingdom if we weren’t here to win. Had my A-team become a mercenary outfit for the defense contractors who made their fortunes on my men’s blood?
“Join us,” the Chief told me down there in the basement. “Join us and I will save you from spending the rest of your life in prison.”
I studied Mr. Lizard in his black civilian suit. The ramifications of his offer, and that I was down here with him, began to sink in. The military careerists would sell me down the river if the politicians in Washington gave the nod. Somehow, this small man with the wire-rim glasses could make those politicians dance for him. How I knew that to be true, I don’t know. But in those things, I’d learned to trust my gut.
So I said, “Sure.”
A ghost of a smile touched the Chief’s lips. “You are wise,” he said, as he retrieved the paper, putting it in his briefcase. He shut the lid, snapped the locks, got up and left.
I received my Army discharge that day. Then I flew out of Kabul to a training camp in Germany. I had ex-KGB instructors to teach me dirty tricks, as only Russians knew them. For refined tactics, there were two ex-Mossad agents—Israelis who had helped assassinate countless Arabs.
The movie version of an assassin shows a lone wolf who hunts his prey through dark alleyways. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was a team effort, usually with eight to twelve members. Two of them were the triggermen. The rest were spotters, lookouts, facilitators and the backup team.
There was nothing glamorous about assassinating a man, not even shooting a deserving terrorist. It was one thing to be in a firefight, with the enemy shooting back at you. As the bullets hissed past your head, your adrenalin pumped, fear coursed up and down your body and you repeatedly pulled a trigger as your blood boiled. Unless everything went wrong, however, an assassination attempt was entirely different. Others trailed your mark and figured out the man’s habits, deciding on the best locale to ambush him. On the chosen day, the team closed in like a fisherman’s net. Some watched for intruders, while others kept your lanes of escape open. Often, you walked up to where the target ordered a glass of wine at a bar.
“Mr. Arafat?” you’d ask.
A fat bearded man at the bar would swivel around. He’d have bloodshot eyes, with spittle drooling from the corner of his mouth. “Yes?” he’d say.
By that time, your silenced gun would already be in your hand. You touched the tip of the barrel against his chest and pulled the trigger five times, fast. His eyes would widen horribly as he exhaled his stale breath into your face. Because you had used .22 shorts, the bullets wouldn’t exit his body, but ricocheted around in his ribs, acting like shrapnel. As he slumped back against the bar, you’d head for the exit. If anyone else was in the bar, he or she was usually too shocked to react. If anyone tried to stop you, two facilitators in the bar moved forward and pushed the intruder away. By that time, you’d be outside, walking fast to your getaway car.
The difference between a firefight in combat and assassination was its cold-bloodedness. To be a good assassin you had to be a hardened killer or a psychotic S.O.B. Unfortunately for me, it turned out I was neither.
One of my ex-Mossad trainers must have recognized the truth. We both drank too much vodka on occasion. The last time we did, we stood on a pier on the Rhine River. A bottle rested on the railing as we clutched shot glasses. As the water flowed below us, he told me a little-known secret of the trade.
He stared between the boards of the pier as he said, “Each person killed takes a year off your life.”
“What?” I asked.
“You may not feel their deaths now, Kiel, but you will when you’re old. The killings will come back to haunt you. I know. I know,” he said, finishing his drink and pouring another. “Each kill drains your soul, eating a year of your life. The killing is changing you.”
I remember staring at him. He had bags under his eyes and a big liver spot on the left side of his nose. He clicked the shot glass against his teeth every time he sipped. His brown eyes were watery as he told me the secret.
I remember those watery eyes, but I don’t remember anything else about that night. I don’t even remember where I woke up the next day. I do know that three months later I had a short talk with the Chief. I wanted out of the trade. I was sick of killing for hire.
Yes, I knew what everyone else knew in the Shop. There was supposedly only one way to exit their august company. That was in a cedar box lined with silk. They didn’t bury you. Instead, while trapped in the coffin, they put you on a conveyor that fed into an incinerator. It was a slow conveyor, allowing you time to sweat as the box began to smolder inside. There were stories of screaming men, desperately banging against the sides and begging for a second chance.
The Chief told me in his office in Geneva, “No one leaves us, Herr Kiel.”
“I’m done killing. I’m through. Do you understand me?”
Those lizard eyes studied a spot on the wall. Finally, he nodded. “You are unique, as I’m sure you’ve come to recognize. I appreciate your skills. Perhaps we have overused you of late. A vacation, yes, I will allow you a vacation.”
Thoughts of lying in a moving coffin burning to death kept me from telling him to shove his vacation offer.
“I have the perfect cover job for you, Herr Kiel, while you relax.”
“No more wet work.”
“I have already agreed to that,” he told me.
Sure
.
My new assignment was to watch a group of scientists in Geneva. Technically, I worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN, which built the particle accelerator. No doubt, the Chief believed he could pull me out at any time and demand an update, or insist on a piece of sabotage or the liquidation of some unruly scientist.
I ran security for Kay’s team. I supervised the equipment inspection, the checkpoints and made sure I was the only spy around. Maybe to ensure my cooperation, the Chief engineered Dave’s hiring. The Chief had no compunction about using people or bending others through emotional manipulation. Dave had left the Green Berets six months after my discharge. For a time, he’d worked for Blacksand, a mercenary organization. Then he decided he wanted a change and accepted this amazing offer, which seemed to come to him as a fluke. To his delight, he found himself in my unit.
It was good to be with a friend again, my best friend. I kept silent about many things, especially the Shop, and I drank far too much. Dave joined me on some of my binges. Something about assassinating others gave a man a growing capacity to drink without being able to get drunk. It was a horrible thing, forcing me to guzzle greater quantities to numb myself. Over the months, Dave declined to join me more and more often. As a personal compensation, he soon enticed Kay into walks in a nearby park. He’d always had a knack with the ladies.