Reid leapt to the right to avoid the rushing blade. The knife’s tip missed him by inches, but he overcompensated and tripped over the green sofa.
Otets’s legs were free; while Reid was straddling him, he hadn’t noticed that the binding around his ankles had come loose. The Russian held the knife in both hands, still bound at the wrists. His eyes were wide and bloodshot—standing there in just his briefs, he looked like a maniac.
Reid scrambled to his feet and put up both hands, palms out. “Don’t,” he said. “You’re still weak from the river. Just drop the knife. No one needs to get hurt.”
Otets shook his head vigorously, spraying water from his wet hair. “You still do not get it. I told you, I cannot leave here alive. If Amun finds out I gave you information, I am a dead man anyway.”
“The police will put you in custody, somewhere safe, where no one can get to you—”
Otets laughed wildly. “Do not be stupid! Do you really believe we cared what Mustafar might have told you? Of course not! We only wanted to know his location… so we could find him and kill him for his betrayal.”
“Wait—”
Otets lunged forward, stabbing straight toward Reid’s sternum. He twisted his torso to the left and, before he even knew what he was doing, forced Otets’s elbows straight down. His wrists, straight up. In a motion quicker than Reid’s own shocked thoughts, he drove the knife into Otets’s throat, guided by the Russian’s own two hands.
A gurgle escaped his lips. A thin fountain of blood arced across the cabin, spattering the wall and floor. Otets collapsed in a heap, leaking liberally on the thin carpet.
Reid heaved a ragged, breathy sigh. It had happened so fast, and his body simply reacted without thinking. Once again he had someone else’s blood on his hands. He sat heavily on the sofa, holding both hands out in front of him. His fingers did not tremble this time.
He had no captive to turn over to the authorities now, no one to corroborate his claims. Otets’s bomb-making facility was destroyed, and he doubted the Russian was foolhardy enough to leave evidence or a paper trail. He had four dead bodies in a basement in Paris, a huge hole in the earth in Belgium, and now the possibility that someone—or more than one someone—was actively working against him in the CIA.
I didn’t do this to myself, he decided. This was done to me. To make me forget what I had learned… so I wouldn’t get in the way.
He was certain of it. Kent had found something he wasn’t supposed to find—possibly in Sheikh Mustafar—and his own people suppressed his memory. This organization, Amun, must have discovered that he was still alive from the mole (or moles) in the CIA. They found his location and gave it to the Iranians.
He had never felt so alone as he did in that moment, sitting in a tiny cabin in Belgium with the dead body of a Russian terrorist at his feet. Where would it be safe for him? Could he trust any authorities—or anyone at all, for that matter?
He had no idea what he was going to do, at least in the long term, but he knew what he had to do next. First, he put his clothes back on, now dried and warmed by the electric stove. He pulled on the sturdy brown boots and his bomber jacket. In the kitchen, he reassembled the Glock and put that in a pocket. He took apart Otets’s phone, saved the SIM card, and crushed the rest of it thoroughly beneath a heel. The broken pieces he flushed down the toilet.
He put the knife, the extension cord, and the tea kettle back where he found them. He checked the pockets of Otets’s slacks, but found nothing more than the phone. There was no wallet, no identification, no nothing.
Reid used the wet towel to clean as much of the blood as he could off of the walls and floor. Then he rolled Otets’s body in the threadbare carpet, along with his still-wet clothes.
In a nightstand drawer of the rear bedroom was a Bible, and he found a pen in one of the kitchen drawers. On the inside front cover of the Bible he scribbled a note—he couldn’t find any paper in the cabin.
Finally, he took the wool blanket from the cabin’s bedroom. He turned off the lights and the electric stove and left the Bible on the front porch, just outside the door. In the morning, the Belgian woman would come to check on them, and hopefully she would question the book’s placement and at least open the front cover, where she would find several more hundred-euro bills and Reid’s note, written in French:
I’m sorry.
I gave you my word that we wouldn’t cause you any trouble, but I was forced to break that. Please do not go into the cabin. The man that came here with me is dead inside. You should call the police. Ask them to get Interpol involved. Tell them that this man goes by a codename of “Otets.” He ran a vineyard across the Meuse. His facility exploded last night. If they dig a little deeper, they’ll find more.
I’m sorry this happened. I never meant to involve you.
*
The very first rays of dawn peeked over the horizon as Reid arrived in Brussels. He had started out by walking from the barley farm to the road, the wool blanket draped over his shoulders and around him. It was a bit scratchy, but at least it kept him warm against the freezing night. The occasional car passed by, and Reid stopped and stuck out a thumb—he wasn’t sure if that was a universal hitchhiking gesture or not, and apparently neither did Kent, since no memory flashed. Eventually a pickup truck stopped for him. The driver spoke Dutch and only a little German, but he understood two things: Brüssel, and the fistful of euros Reid offered him.
The language barrier made for a quiet two-hour ride to the city. Reid had a lot of time to think. He felt awful about the position he had put the Flemish woman in, but he had little choice; he couldn’t very well hide Otets’s body. He couldn’t have buried it, not with the ground frozen, and even if he could, if it had ever been discovered, the woman would take the blame. The decision to ask her to involve Interpol was a logical one, based on Otets’s dealings. It was likely that the explosion at the facility had been seen or heard by someone and reported. He couldn’t be sure that the local police would be able to separate the bomb components from the factory equipment and machinery.
He had thought briefly about leaving his name—or rather, Kent’s name. The notion wasn’t for the sake of some haughty claim or taunt, but rather in the hopes that it might reach CIA ears and rattle some cages. Assuming that Otets had told the truth, the mole, or moles, in the organization would likely get nervous and do something brash. Make a misstep. Furthermore, he didn’t want the Belgian woman to take any sort of fall for what he had done. Ultimately, though, he decided against it. He needed to remain incognito for as long as he could.
He did not mention the name Amun in his note either, simply because he wasn’t fully sure yet what it meant or what it was. If the wrong people thought that he knew, it might cause panic—and he needed answers more than he needed to be evading more bullets.
He asked the driver to drop him off somewhere downtown. He got out on Hallenstraat and paid the man. As he looked around, no visions flashed in his head. No memories sparked. Apparently Kent had never been to Brussels, or at least not this part of it.
The city’s downtown took his breath away. The architecture was stunning; the amount of history on every block was simply awe-inspiring. He had once thought similarly of New York, when he had first moved there, but few structures in the US were more than two hundred years old. Here, in Belgium, he was standing in the center of more than a thousand years of Western civilization. The Professor Lawson side of him would have been downright giddy to explore such a historically rich city.
With that thought came a tinge of mild panic. He hadn’t even realized it, but the further he delved into this plot, the less he still felt like Professor Reid Lawson. With each new development, with every life-threatening situation, and with all the new memories that returned, he was feeling more and more like Kent Steele.
He shook the thought from his head. He had two goals here in Brussels, both of which could be accomplished at one place. He paused at a street vendor and asked her in French where he might find the nearest Internet café, and then he followed her directions the six-block distance to a place called Cyber Voyageurs.
The café was just opening for the day when he arrived. The clerk, a young man wearing round, silver glasses, yawned at him and asked something in Dutch.
“English?” Reid asked.
“Yes, English. Can I help you?”
Reid ordered a coffee and pulled the SIM card out of his pocket. “I dropped my phone in the road and a car ran it over. But I managed to save the SIM. Can you get the information off of this?”
“That should not be a problem, as long as it is not damaged. Give me a few minutes.” The young man took the card into a back room.
While Reid waited, he sipped his coffee and sat down at a computer to accomplish his second goal. First he created a new email account with an innocuous address, and then he logged into Skype.
“I’ll set up a fake account,” Maya had told him yesterday, “under another name. You’ll know it.”
He set up his own fake account, using the new email address and the name Alan Moon. It was the first name that popped into his head—the name on the side of the board game he had last played with his daughters before being taken hostage. Then he searched.
“You’ll know it,” he muttered to himself, stroking his chin stubble. “Let’s try…” He searched for the name Kate Lawson. It seemed like the most likely choice in fake names for Maya to use. Several Kate Lawsons came up, but he was certain that Maya would include some identifying detail that would tell him it was her. “Too obvious,” he scolded himself. “She’s smarter than that.” He tried Kate’s maiden name, Schoeninger. Still nothing. He tried Katherine Lawson and Katherine Schoeninger, to no avail.
Then he almost smacked himself in the forehead. It should have been apparent right away. Kate’s middle name was Joanne—and so was Maya’s. He typed in “Katherine Joanne,” and then almost laughed out loud. One of the results had the avatar of a tiny red plastic man, holding a rifle. It was a game piece, a soldier from Risk.
He clicked on the profile to send a message, but the words didn’t come easily.
Am I being paranoid?
He closed his eyes.
No. You’re being safe. Let’s think this through.
If I’m right, and the CIA did this to me, then they know about my girls. And if Otets wasn’t lying, and there are moles in the agency, it wouldn’t be that hard for them to find a hotel reservation under the name Lawson.
He typed a message: I need you to leave there. No questions asked. Don’t tell me where you’re going. Don’t tell Aunt Linda. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t use your real names.
Reid swallowed the lump in his throat as he fully realized what he was asking of Maya. He was asking his sixteen-year-old daughter to take her younger sister and simply leave, to go somewhere without telling anyone at all. But they needed to be safe. If something happened to them, he would never forgive himself.
Remember, he typed, no phones. No police. Get on a bus and go somewhere you’ve never been before. If they had done as he had asked and taken the cash advances on his credit cards, they should have enough money to last a little while. Check in here with a message at least every twelve hours so I know you’re okay. I’ll check it as often as I’m able.
He wanted to say more. He wanted to tell Maya that he was fine, and that he would be home soon. But he couldn’t bring himself to type the words, knowing that they weren’t at all true. He was far from fine. He had no idea if he would ever see them again.
I love you both.
Reid didn’t wait for a reply. Maya told him she would check the account occasionally from the hotel computers, and he didn’t expect her to be sitting in front of one, waiting for him to reach out (at least he certainly hoped she wasn’t). He logged out and then cleared the computer’s browsing history.
The young man came out of the back room, frowning and pinching the SIM card between two fingers as if it were an offensive insect. “I am sorry,” he told Reid, “but there seems to be a problem.”
Reid’s heart sank. “You couldn’t get anything off of it?”
The clerk shook his head. “Almost nothing. No contact, no photos… just a single text message. It could be that the card was damaged—”
“The text message,” Reid interrupted. “What did it say?”
“It is an address,” the man said. “But that is all.”
“That’s fine,” Reid said quickly. “Can you write it down?” It was possible that the SIM card was damaged in the river, but he thought it was more likely that Otets was clever enough not to store contacts and sensitive information in a phone. He probably had an address book somewhere under lock and key (though now it was certainly incinerated). Reid felt a crushing pang of disappointment in his gut. The amount of hard evidence he had destroyed in that explosion might have put a lid on this whole thing, or at the very least given him a better lead than a single address sent by text message. “I don’t suppose you got the phone number that sent it?” he asked.
The clerk shook his head. “It was blocked.” He scribbled the address onto the back of a receipt, folded it, and handed it to Reid, who in turn slid a fifty-euro bill across the counter.
“You never saw me,” he said. “And you certainly didn’t write down an address.”
The clerk nodded solemnly and pocketed the note. “I’ve already forgotten it.”
Reid took a seat at a table in the far corner to finish his coffee, though it mostly sat there growing cold as he weighed his options. He could barely process everything that had happened in the last ten hours.
Try to chunk it, his academic brain told him. Take these individual pieces and make them into a coherent concept. Then come to the logical conclusion.
First and foremost, he decided, was that if everything he thought he knew was correct, then his girls were not safe. Hopefully he had taken care of that with his message, but that also meant that he could no longer simply give up and go home.
With Otets dead, he had no one to turn over to the authorities. He had no solid evidence; only the locations of bodies, burnt or shot or stabbed, and all at his hand. How would that look? And then, of course, was the bigger problem that he wasn’t sure he could even trust the authorities.
Finally, there was himself—not the him that he knew, but this new aspect that was slowly spilling into his consciousness like a capsized oil tanker. His sense of urgency, of obligation, was growing stronger. The Kent Steele side of his brain was pushing him to keep going.
And at this point, he didn’t see any other choice.
Reid unfolded the receipt paper the clerk had given him and checked the address, hoping it was close by. He deflated with a deep sigh when he saw it was in Zurich.
How the hell am I supposed to get to Switzerland?
A flight would take barely an hour, but he didn’t have a passport or any identification at all; even if he could pay the airfare in cash, they wouldn’t let him on a plane. The same would apply with a train. He didn’t have a car—though a sudden flashing memory zipped through his brain to tell him that he knew how to disable an alarm and hotwire a vehicle. Even so, not every border would be as lax as France/Belgium was, and if the car was reported stolen, he’d have bigger problems on his hands.
He left the café and paced down the block, pausing to buy a scone so he would have something in his stomach. He took a seat on a bench and ate slowly, thinking. A truck rumbled past him, emblazoned with a yellow delivery company logo… and it gave him an idea.
He stepped back into the bakery and asked where the closest supermarket was. The woman behind the counter told him there was a Carrefour Market about a twelve-minute walk from there. He thanked her and headed southeast on Rue Grétry. He found the market easily—it took up nearly half a city block—but instead of going inside, he went around to the rear, to the loading bays.
It took about forty-five minutes of milling about, but a truck finally pulled into the loading bay and slowly backed its trailer up to the rolling steel door at the back of the market. A portly driver in a derby cap climbed out and went inside for a few minutes, and then came out with his paperwork and lit a cigarette while the employees inside unloaded his cargo.
Reid approached and smiled. “Deutsche?” he asked.
“Ja,” said the man, somewhat suspiciously.
“I’m looking for a ride,” Reid said in German. He flashed a few bills. “Heading south.”
The truck driver took a long drag on his cigarette. “You are American?”
“Yes. I lost my passport, and I have no other way back.”
The man smirked. “Drink a bit too much, eh? Ended up in Brussels?”
What is wrong with Americans that everyone assumes that? Reid thought. Still, it was a decent enough alibi. “Yes,” he said, trying to look sheepish. “My family is waiting for me in Zurich.”
The driver blew a plume of smoke through his nostrils. “I could lose my job for that.”
“And I could be stuck in Belgium for weeks waiting for the embassy to help me,” Reid countered. “Please.”
The driver grunted and kicked at a small stone, sending it skittering across the lot. “I’m heading south,” he said, “but not far enough for where you want to go. There’s a truck depot on the way. We can stop in and I’ll help get you another ride.”
“Thank you.” Reid handed him the bills.
The man pointed down the block. “Behind that building is a parking lot. Wait for me there.”
Reid did as he was asked, hurrying down to the smaller lot adjacent to a business complex and waiting for the driver to pick him up. The truck rumbled into the lot about ten minutes later. The driver lifted the rear trailer gate just enough for Reid to scoot inside.
The trailer was refrigerated to protect the load of foodstuffs it was hauling, but Reid didn’t mind. He still had the wool blanket, and he draped it over himself and hugged his knees to his chest. He’d dealt with worse cold mere hours ago. Besides—it was much better than being stopped at a border with no passport or identification.
As the truck rumbled southbound down E411, he pulled the blanket over his head to create a pocket of heat. He realized how exhausted he was and tried to doze off, but every time the truck hit a rut in the road he jolted alert. He wasn’t yet accustomed to these new instincts; his muscles went taut as steel cables and his eyes scanned for threats. He had to constantly remind himself that he was in the back of a truck, alone, heading down a highway.
He thought about what he might find at the address in Zurich. If everything he had been through so far was any indication, he was certain it would be nothing good. In fact, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there might have been a reason that it was the only piece of data in Otets’s phone.
He couldn’t help but feel that he might be walking into another trap.