The entire process took about half an hour, and twice in that span customers banged on the door to the restroom (the second time, a woman shouting in French that her child was nearly to bursting). Both times Reid just shouted back, “Occupé!”
Finally, when he was finished, he examined himself again in the mirror. It was far from perfect, but at least it didn’t look like he had been beaten in a subterranean torture chamber. He wondered if he should have gone with a darker foundation, something to make him appear more foreign. Did the caller know who he was supposed to be meeting? Would they recognize who he was—or who they thought he was? The three men who had come to his home didn’t seem so sure; they had checked against a photograph.
“What am I doing?” he asked himself. You’re preparing for a meeting with a dangerous criminal that is likely a known terrorist, said the voice in his head—not this new intrusive voice, but his own, Reid Lawson’s voice. It was his own common sense, mocking him.
Then that poised, assertive personality, the one just beneath the surface, spoke up. You’ll be fine, it told him. Nothing you haven’t done before. His hand reached instinctively for the grip of the Beretta tucked into the back of his pants, concealed by his new jacket. You know all this.
Before leaving the drug store, he picked up a few more items: a cheap watch, a bottle of water, and two candy bars. Outside on the sidewalk, he devoured both chocolate bars. He wasn’t sure how much blood he had lost and he wanted to keep his sugar level up. He drained the entire bottle of water, and then asked a passerby for the time. He set the watch and slipped it around his wrist.
It was half past six. He had plenty of time to get to the rendezvous place early and prepare.
*
It was nearly nightfall before he reached the address he’d been given over the phone. The sunset over Paris cast long shadows down the boulevard. 187 Rue de Stalingrad was a bar in the 10th arrondissement called Féline, a dive of a joint with painted-over windows and a cracked façade. It was situated on a street otherwise populated by art studios, Indian restaurants, and bohemian cafes.
Reid paused with his hand on the door. If he entered, there would be no turning back. He could still walk away. No, he decided, he couldn’t. Where would he go? Back home, so they could find him all over again? And living with these strange visions in his head?
He went inside.
The bar’s walls were painted black and red and covered with fifties-era posters of grim-faced women and cigarette holders and silhouettes. It was too early, or perhaps too late, for the place to be busy. The few patrons that milled about spoke in hushed tones, hunched protectively over their drinks. Melancholy blues music played softly from a stereo behind the bar.
Reid scanned the place left to right and back again. No one looked his way, and certainly no one there looked like the types that had taken him hostage. He took a small table near the rear and sat facing the door. He ordered a coffee, though it mostly sat in front of him steaming.
A hunched old man slid from a stool and limped across the bar toward the restrooms. Reid found his gaze quickly drawn to the movement, scanning the man. Late sixties. Hip dysplasia. Yellowish fingers, labored breathing—a cigar smoker. His eyes flitted to the other side of the bar without moving his head, where two rough-looking men in overalls were having a hushed but fervent conversation about sports. Factory workers. The one on the left isn’t getting enough sleep, likely a father to young children. Man on the right was in a fight recently, or at least threw a punch; his knuckles are bruised. Without thinking, he found himself examining the cuffs of their pants, their sleeves, and the way they held their elbows on the table. Someone with a gun will protect it, try to conceal it, even unconsciously.
Reid shook his head. He was getting paranoid, and these persistent foreign thoughts weren’t helping. But then he remembered the strange occurrence with the pharmacy, the recollection of its location just by mere mention of needing to find one. The academic in him spoke up. Maybe there’s something to be learned from this. Maybe instead of fighting it, you should try opening up to it.
The waitress was a young, tired-looking woman with a knotty brunette mane. “Stylo?” he asked as she passed him by. “Ou crayon?” Pen or pencil? She reached into the tangle of hair and found a pen. “Merci.”
He smoothed a cocktail napkin and set the tip of the pen to it. This wasn’t some new skill he’d never learned; this was a Professor Lawson tactic, one he had used many times in the past to recall and strengthen memory.
He thought back to his conversation, if he could call it that, with the three Arabic captors. He tried not to think of their dead eyes, the blood on the floor, or the tray of sharp implements intended to cut whatever truth they thought he had out of him. Instead he focused on the verbal details and wrote the first name that came to mind.
Then he muttered it aloud. “Sheikh Mustafar.”
A Moroccan black site. A man who spent his entire life in wealth and power, treading on those less fortunate than him, crushing them beneath his shoe—now scared shitless because he knows you can bury him to his neck in the sand and no one would ever find his bones.
“I’ve told you all I know!” he insists.
Tut-tut. “My intel says otherwise. Says you might know a hell of a lot more, but you may be afraid of the wrong people. Tell you what, Sheikh… my friend in the next room? He’s getting antsy. See, he’s got this hammer—it’s just a little thing, a rock hammer, like a geologist would use? But it does wonders on small bones, knuckles…”
“I swear it!” The sheikh wrings his hands nervously. You recognize it as a tell. “There were other conversations about the plans, but they were in German, Russian… I didn’t understand!”
“You know, Sheikh… a bullet sounds the same in every language.”
Reid snapped back to the dive bar. His throat felt dry. The memory had been intense, as vivid and lucid as any he knew he had actually experienced. And it had been his voice in his head, threatening casually, saying things he would never dream of saying to another person.
Plans. The sheikh had definitely said something about plans. Whatever terrible thing was nagging at his subconscious, he had the distinct feeling it had not yet happened.
He took a sip of the now-lukewarm coffee to calm his nerves. “Okay,” he told himself. “Okay.” During his interrogation in the basement, they had asked about fellow agents in the field, and three names had flashed across his mind. He wrote one, and then read it out loud. “Morris.”
A face immediately came to him, a man in his early thirties, handsome and knowing it. A cocky half-smirk with only one side of his mouth. Dark hair, styled to make him look young.
A private airstrip in Zagreb. Morris sprints alongside you. You both have your guns drawn, barrels pointed downward. You can’t let the two Iranians reach the plane. Morris aims between strides and pops off two shots. One clips a calf and the first man falls. You gain on the other, tackling him brutally to the ground…
Another name. “Reidigger.”
A boyish smile, neatly combed hair. A bit of a paunch. He’d wear the weight better if he was a few inches taller. The butt of a lot of ribbing, but takes it good-naturedly.
The Ritz in Madrid. Reidigger covers the hall as you kick in the door and catch the bomber off guard. The man goes for the gun on the bureau, but you’re faster. You snap his wrist… Later Reidigger tells you he heard the sound from out in the corridor. Turned his stomach. Everyone laughs.
The coffee was cold now, but Reid barely noticed. His fingers were trembling. There was no doubt about it; whatever was happening to him, these were memories—his memories. Or someone’s. The captors, they had cut something out of his neck and called it a memory suppressor. That couldn’t be true; this wasn’t him. This was someone else. He had someone else’s memories mingling with his own.
Reid set the pen to the napkin again and wrote the final name. He said it aloud: “Johansson.” A shape swam into his mind. Long blonde hair, conditioned to a sheen. Smooth, shapely cheekbones. Full lips. Gray eyes, the color of slate. A vision flashed…
Milan. Night. A hotel. Wine. Maria sits on the bed with her legs folded under her. The top three buttons of her shirt are open. Her hair is tousled. You’ve never noticed how long her eyelashes are before. Two hours ago you watched her kill two men in a gunfight, and now it’s Sangiovese and Pecorino Toscano. Your knees almost touch. Her gaze meets yours. Neither of you speak. You can see it in her eyes, but she knows you can’t. She asks about Kate…
Reid winced as a headache came on, spreading through his cranium like a storm cloud. At the same time, the vision blurred and faded. He squeezed his eyes shut and gripped his temples for a full minute until the headache receded.
What the hell was that?
For some reason, it seemed that the memory of this woman, Johansson, had triggered the brief migraine. Even more unsettling, however, was the bizarre sensation that gripped him in the wake of the headache. It felt like… desire. No, it was more than that—it felt like passion, reinforced by excitement and even a bit of danger.
He couldn’t help but wonder who the woman was, but he shook it off. He didn’t want to incite another headache. Instead he set the pen to the napkin again, about to write the final name—Zero. That’s what the Iranian interrogator had called him. But before he could write it or recite it, he felt a bizarre sensation. The hairs on the nape of his neck stood on end.
He was being watched.
When he glanced up again, he saw a man standing in Féline’s dark doorway, his gaze locked on Reid like a hawk eyeing a mouse. Reid’s blood ran cold. He was being watched.
This was the man he was here to meet, he was certain of it. Did he recognize him? The Arabic men hadn’t seemed to. Was this man expecting someone else?
He set the pen down. Slowly and surreptitiously, he crumpled the napkin and dropped it into his half-empty cold coffee.
The man nodded once. Reid nodded back.
Then the stranger reached behind him, for something tucked in the back of his pants.
CHAPTER FIVE
Reid stood with such force that his chair nearly toppled. His hand immediately wrapped around the textured grip of the Beretta, warm from his lower back. His mind screamed at him frantically. This is a public place. There are people here. I’ve never fired a gun before.
Before Reid drew his pistol, the stranger pulled a billfold from his back pocket. He grinned at Reid, apparently amused by his jumpy nature. No one else in the bar seemed to have noticed, except the waitress with the rat’s nest of hair, who simply raised an eyebrow.
The stranger approached the bar, slid a bill across the table, and muttered something to the bartender. Then he made his way to Reid’s table. He stood behind the empty chair for a long moment, a thin smirk on his lips.
He was young, thirty at best, with close-cropped hair and a five o’clock shadow. He was quite lanky and his face was gaunt, making his sharp cheekbones and jutting chin look almost caricature-ish. Most disarming was the black horn-rimmed glasses he wore, looking for all the world as if Buddy Holly had grown up in the eighties and discovered cocaine.
He was right-handed, Reid could tell; he held his left elbow close to his body, which likely meant he had a pistol hanging from a shoulder holster in his armpit so he could draw with his right, if need be. His left arm pinned his black suede jacket closed to hide the gun.
“Mogu sjediti?” the man asked finally.
Mogu…? Reid didn’t immediately understand the way he had with Arabic and French. It wasn’t Russian, but it was close enough for him to derive the meaning from context. The man was asking if he could sit down.
Reid gestured to the empty chair across from him, and the man sat, keeping his left elbow tucked all the while.
As soon as he was seated, the waitress brought a glass of dark amber beer and set it before him. “Merci,” he said. He grinned at Reid. “Your Serbian is not so good?”
Reid shook his head. “No.” Serbian? He had assumed the man he would be meeting would be Arabic, like his captors and the interrogator.
“In English, then? Ou francais?”
“Dealer’s choice.” Reid was surprised at how calm and even his voice sounded. His heart was nearly bursting out of his chest from fear and… and if he was being honest, at least a shred of anxious excitement.
The Serbian man’s grin widened. “I enjoy this place. It is dark. It is quiet. It is the only bar that I know of in this arrondissement that serves Franziskaner. It is my favorite.” He took a long swig from his glass, his eyes closed, and a grunt of pleasure escaped his throat. “Que delicioso.” He opened his eyes and added, “You are not what I expected.”
A surge of panic rose in Reid’s gut. He knows, his mind screamed at him. He knows you’re not who he’s supposed to meet, and he has a gun.
Relax, said the other side, the new part. You can handle this.
Reid gulped, but somehow managed to maintain his icy demeanor. “Nor are you,” he replied.
The Serbian chuckled. “That is fair. But we are many, yes? And you—you are American?”
“Expat,” Reid answered.
“Are not we all?” Another chuckle. “Before you I met only one other American in our, um… what is the word… conglomerate? Yes. So for me, it is not so strange.” The man winked.
Reid tensed. He couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not. What if he knew that Reid was a fake and was leading him on or buying time? He placed his hands in his lap to hide his trembling fingers.
“You may call me Yuri. What may I call you?”
“Ben.” It was the first name that came to mind, the name of a mentor from his days as an assistant professor.
“Ben. How did you come to work for the Iranians?”
“With,” Reid corrected. He narrowed his eyes for effect. “I work with them.”
The man, this Yuri, took another sip of his beer. “Sure. With. How did that come to be? Despite our mutual interests, they tend to be a, uh… closed group.”
“I’m trustworthy,” Reid said without blinking. He had no idea where these words were coming from, nor the conviction with which they were coming. He said them as easily as if he’d rehearsed it.
“And where is Amad?” Yuri asked casually.
“Couldn’t make it,” Reid replied evenly. “Sends his regards.”
“All right, Ben. You say the deed is done.”
“Yes.”
Yuri leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. Reid could smell the malt on his breath. “I need to hear you say it, Ben. Tell me, is CIA man dead?”
Reid froze for a moment. CIA? As in, the CIA? Suddenly all the talk of agents in the field and visions of detaining terrorists on airfields and in hotels made more sense, even if the entirety of the matter didn’t. Then he remembered the gravity of his situation and hoped that he hadn’t given any cues to betray his charade.
He too leaned forward and said slowly, “Yes, Yuri. CIA man is dead.”
Yuri leaned back casually and grinned again. “Good.” He plucked up his glass. “And the information? You have it?”
“He gave us everything he knew,” Reid told him. He couldn’t help but notice that his fingers were no longer trembling beneath the table. It was as if someone else was in control now, as if Reid Lawson was taking a backseat in his own brain. He decided not to fight it.
“The location of Mustafar?” Yuri asked. “And all he told them?”