When I woke up, I had a hood over my head. It was translucent against the glare of a naked bulb above me. I could discern shapes moving around. Two males. There was very little being talked about between them. Mostly what I heard was my own breathing. They’d sat me in a chair and roped my hands behind me and were finishing up the knots that kept me anchored to the back strut. Once that binding was tight, they whispered several words to each other, then exited through what sounded like a metal door.
And everything went silent.
I waited a long time.
“Is . . . uh . . . anyone . . . uh . . .?” I spoke into a void.
I waited again.
“Hello?” I said. “Is anyone in this room?”
I had to assess my surroundings based solely on acoustics—my voice serving as a sort of probe. I had no sense of where I was. It smelled like damp dirt. I waited—I had nothing to do but wait—but where was Jenn? How badly had I messed this up? Was she in another room just like this one? Could they have hurt her? That’s what starts to plague your conscience and it doesn’t stop. That’s what, without exaggeration, began destroying me from the inside out—the fact that I’d brought her into this, even handed her a hard drive with divisive content on it, and left her to fend for herself. Life gave me so many chances to leave her out of my pathetic trajectory and I’d dragged her downhill, for what? For what?! What made you think you could take care of her, you selfish prick? Hugo was alone when he ambushed me and that told me everything I didn’t want to know—his crew was too smart for my sad trick and three of them stayed on site to surround Jenn. How could you be so arrogant as to think you could win? After what felt like an hour, one of the guys returned. Just one. He didn’t say anything. He walked in front of me, eclipsing the light from the bulb for a moment, then went behind me, having only presented a shadow of himself, where he seemed to stay still for nearly an hour, then he came over and suddenly yanked off my hood, which scared the living shit out of me.
Right away I could see I was in a basement. Barren. No furniture. No boxes. Nothing on the walls. He tossed the hood somewhere behind us on what sounded like a workbench, then leaned against that workbench, nothing else happening for a few minutes until he opened a metal toolbox and rummaged through it until finding a moment to say what he had to say to me, which amounted to one sentence, one single sentence, the only three words he’d utter for the next five mind-numbing hours.
“Where is she?”
That was it.
Five hours. Just those words. Said once. I tried to answer him, of course. Over and over, I tried to answer him in various ways, guessing at every permutation of what he wanted. Where was she? I sat there laboring under the unending, self-inflicted, ever-widening avalanche of anguish. For anyone wanting to know how to induce madness in an insecure mind like my own, this is the formula: ask an unanswerable question, keep it short, stand behind your listener with a vague weapon, then let him deconstruct his entire universe until his brain floods itself with idiocies, like calculating the ridiculous physics of flipping his chair backward, up and backward, as if he could miraculously land on the strut and free himself to fight you.
“It’s working on me, man,” I said to him a half day into it. “I’m telling you, you got me going to dark places inside. If your goal was to fuck me up internally, I’m fucked up internally.” I’d begun the downward spiral of unzipping my personal baggage. “Because you know how most people get to a point in life where they can declare admirably impressive shit, like they finally get to stand up to their asshole dad and all that? ‘Dad, you can’t slap me around anymore’? Took a stand? Well, me, I never had that. And I know you don’t want to hear this but a month before I finally found the balls to resist him, he hid himself. You know where? In a coffin . . . In a coffin . . . out of reach . . . for all eternity. Guy bailed when I was seventeen. Hahaha, checkmate, son. So I lost. I never got to kick his teeth in. I am what I am today. The cog. Adam the Cog. I wouldn’t dare to believe someone like me could outdo someone like you . . . meaning . . . you, sir, you won. You won, Mr. da Vinci. It’s you, right? It’s you behind me. You won hours ago. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. You want me to fuck the girl over? I’ll fuck the girl over. Just tell me how. Just say how I do it. Tell me how, right? I mean, JUST FUCKING TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT!” I was begging him to say something, to shout something—anything—beyond his one sentence—raising my voice loud enough to finally elicit an abrupt sentence from him that would delineate the rest of my natural-born life.
“You have sixty seconds,” he said.
“What?”
He didn’t repeat himself.
“What?”
I felt the world drop from beneath my feet.
“WAIT! WAIT! WAIT!”
I caved in and began to tell him everything about the young woman known as Katarina Haimovna from start to finish, from start to now, from the hotel fire to Mathilde hanging on the rafter, which left us with where we were now.
He didn’t say anything right away. I’d finished my part and he let the whole thing just hover in the dank air between us, then came around to the front of my chair, where I saw his face for the first time.
“And what does she want?” he said.
The usher.
“You’ve gotten to know her in ways no one else has,” he said. “You will have seen what her focus has been.”
He was the usher from club. “You’re the . . . You’re the usher. You pulled me aside in the back room. In Amsterdam.”
“What does she want?”
It was at this moment that I knew I was with Morgan da Vinci. Nothing made more sense. He was indeed the most ordinary man imaginable, the random guy you pass on the sidewalk, the man standing next to you in line at a supermarket, five-nine, dirty-blond hair, forty something, forgettable—and completely breaking his own protocol to let me see him, which meant the situation was at an impasse for him since—
“NO MORE GAMES!” he yelled, slamming the wrench across the top of my leg, doing it without warning, bringing it down like an atomic bomb, igniting in me the crescendo of a hundred stringed instruments screeching out the wrong notes. He had to have fractured my femur. He hit it that hard. I almost lost consciousness. And somehow the pain itself kept me alert enough to realize he was raising the wrench again and was preparing to hit me across the face.
“She’s not hiding!” I rushed to tell him. “She’s not hiding! She’s not hiding! Katarina—she’s here in Paris.”
He stopped.
“She’s not hiding,” I said. “This is what you couldn’t anticipate. This is why she’s impossible to anticipate. She wants something that we can’t calculate in her.”
“Which is?”
“You heard me describe all the shit I went through with her, right? So you can believe me when I tell you she was never actually trying to hide from you, not lately, because in her world there’s something bigger that she’s chasing. Something much bigger than survival itself.”
He didn’t think my answer was enough. He raised the wrench again. I had to sell the rest of it, the entire thing, as fast as I could.
“I didn’t think it made sense either until I realized you yourself don’t know what she wants because that’s just it, that’s the entirety of it. Nothing she does makes sense to you, to me, to anyone, to anyone unless . . . unless . . . maybe . . . Here it is . . . maybe . . . it’s not escape she wants. It’s not escape. Think about it. She never thought your architect was you but she was going to his condo, why? Because he was your architect? Why? Why go to him?” I had to state the only answer that could work for him. “Because of what you’re about to build. Because it’s no coincidence that half of Europe is trying to close a multinational deal and she’s at her most visible. She’s not acting in self-defense. She’s trying to undermine you. And I’ll prove it. I’ll prove it . . .” He had the wrench up. “BECAUSE WHY ARE YOU THE ONE STANDING IN FRONT OF ME?”
He stopped.
This stopped him.
This was his blank spot.
“Why you?” I said. “Why are you standing here doing your own dirty work?”
He didn’t have an easy answer.
“You could’ve had anyone do it, anyone, but you took an unprecedented risk. You took it because, fuck, man, she’s winning. And she knows it. Your people in your circle know it. They’re nervous. Investors are nervous. Gerald Merck. Deutsche. Suisse. They’re nervous. To get to her, you now have to compromise literally everything you value. Your own team said it: the scars around her neck—self-inflicted. And I’m now saying why would she do that? Because more important to her than anything else, I’m saying more important than her own life, is the legend of it.”
It was the most desperate sales pitch of my entire existence. Pure bullshit, total speculation, completely grounded in the fact that I actually believed every word of it once I said it.
“Her legend,” he said, repeating the words as a trial run on his tongue, and I think it might have had an impact. I think I now had him staring at me, needing a solution.
“So here’s the deal . . . I can help you. I can help you lure her. She’s dangerous to you because she has no predictable rules but I can get to her. I just need one thing first. I need something from you, okay? I just need you . . . to set Jennifer Graham . . . free. That’s it. Jennifer. One life for another. A trade. Nothing else. And I’ll help you.”
I wasn’t sure if he understood me.
“Okay?” I said.
“It is true . . . that you’re going to help me.”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t have Jennifer Graham.”
“You . . .? You don’t?”
“I never had her . . . I have no idea who would have her . . . because I don’t give a shit about her. And now that this has been clarified, let’s get started on the fucking first part of what you said.”