The Prometheus Man Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2017 by Scott Reardon

  Cover design by Keith Hayes

  Cover photograph by Arcangel / Mohamad Itani

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Author photograph by Lindsay Blake

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company

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  First ebook edition: January 2017

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  ISBN 978-0-316-31091-8

  E3-20161222-NF-DA

  To my wife, Lindsay

  To anyone who has a brother and to John, my brother

  FACT:

  May 8, 2001: Researchers inject aging mice with human stem cells. Almost immediately the mice begin scoring better on the Morris water maze, a test of cognitive function.

  June 20, 2006: Doctors at Johns Hopkins inject stem cells from mouse embryos into paralyzed mice. Within a week, the mice recover significant motor activity.

  November 10, 2010: Scientists at the University of Colorado injure the limbs of lab mice and then inject them with stem cells. Within days, the injuries heal. There is, however, an unanticipated side effect. The treated muscles nearly double in size and strength.

  Let justice be done, though the world perish.

  —King Ferdinand

  CHAPTER 1

  “You need to come in.”

  The words came out so low and fast Karl wasn’t sure he’d heard them.

  He rolled over in the bed. “Who is this?” Then he remembered he was on a cell phone and the line wasn’t secure. “Wait. Say again.”

  “You need to come here. Right now.”

  His feet were already on the floor the moment he recognized the voice. There were questions on the tip of his tongue, but the circumstances answered them before he could speak.

  Did something happen at the lab?

  —Of course something happened at the lab.

  Are the police there?

  —He wouldn’t tell you if they were.

  “Fifty minutes,” he said and hung up.

  He was actually only twenty minutes away, but Weaver—the voice on the phone—didn’t know just how frequently he switched hotels. Within minutes, he was out of Paris proper and heading for the lab. It was that hour of night when so much of the world was at rest that it became a sort of death. He sped across silent streets and empty highways, a world without people, until he reached the forest outside Versailles.

  He pulled onto a service road. Once he reached a redundant power station, he skidded to a stop. The wind whistled across his windows and bent the trees in his headlights. He sat there for a minute, knowing he ought to call this in to Langley, ultimately deciding he wasn’t going to do that.

  He drove around the power station and took the road another half mile to a warehouse whose only color came from ancient scabs of red paint.

  The stars were out. Karl could see Weaver sitting on a cinder block surrounded by black leafless trees.

  Weaver had always reminded Karl of Renfield, the attorney Dracula turned into his houseboy. He was short, severe-looking, and had the kind of temper that flares only when a back is turned. Weaver said nothing as Karl approached. His eyes were fixed on the horizon, though in the woods there is no horizon.

  Without looking in Karl’s direction, he stood up and led the way to the lab. The entrance to it was inside the warehouse, which wasn’t actually a warehouse. And that was the idea. No road crew or stray backpacker could ever know what was here.

  Inside, the lab was dark. It wasn’t supposed to be. Weaver flipped the switch to a light by the door.

  And there was blood.

  It was streaked over the plexiglass wall that divided the lab from the rest of the building. Where it wasn’t streaked, it was sprayed.

  Karl saw a handprint in it.

  “I locked them in,” Weaver said. “I had to.”

  He stood waiting for the reaction, the explosion at what he had done. But Karl just turned and stared at him.

  “One of them got loose,” Weaver said. “It was waiting for us.”

  Karl glanced at Weaver’s jacket pockets, looking for the bulge of a weapon.

  “I got out first and used the override. By the time I got back, it had dragged Dr. Feld to the door.”

  “What override?”

  “It was holding him against the glass.” Weaver closed his eyes. “I couldn’t see what it was doing to him, but he was still alive.”

  Karl looked at the plexiglass. There were other partial handprints and, between them, runny smears where someone had tried over and over to wipe away the blood. Which would have been difficult, like scraping egg yolk off a plate after it’s congealed.

  “It was keeping him alive on purpose.” Weaver pulled out another cigarette. “It was torturing him.”

  “‘Animals don’t torture other living things.’ Your words, Dr. Weaver. And please don’t smoke in here.”

  Weaver turned on him. The expression on his face was hard to look at. “You don’t get it. The code. It knew he had the code to get out.”

  Then Karl
understood the purpose behind the wiping. The last one alive would have tried to clear the blood off the glass, so he could see Weaver. Plead with him.

  “Unlock the door,” he said.

  Weaver grimaced like this was a sick joke.

  “They could still be alive. Unlock the door.”

  “But by now the rest of the sample could be loose too. I’m not going to—”

  Karl shoved Weaver back against the wall and pressed his forearm into his neck. Weaver choked in silence, in acceptance.

  “You override the override,” Karl said, “or whatever the hell it is you have to do to get that door open.”

  Weaver worked on the door while Karl went into the woods. At the base of a little tree, he dug up the Sig compact he’d buried in a plastic shopping bag. When he got back, he found Weaver standing across the entrance from the lab door.

  They hit the fluorescents inside, but only a few came on. The rest dangled by their wiring. The alarm system went off, but since they’d disabled the sirens long ago, the blue lights spun in silence, whipping shadows around the room. Through the strobing, Karl could see Dr. Feld. He was right by the door, right where Weaver had last seen him.

  Deep gouges had been cut into his skin, splitting it wide along his legs, back, and sides. His foot, still encased in its Rockport orthopedic walking shoe, lay several feet from his body. His face wasn’t on right: something powerful had gripped it and twisted.

  Feld’s assistant was stretched along the floor nearby, facedown, with one arm extended overhead. Patches of hair and scalp were missing from the back of his head. The other arm was so dislocated from its socket that the wrist rested on the back of his skull. Karl didn’t see Eric Reese, the youngest member of Project Prometheus and the only one he really knew.

  With his weapon raised, Karl crept through the door. The spinning lights made it seem like in every corner of the room something was moving. He listened as hard as he ever had in his life. As he scanned the room for bodies, dead or alive, his eyes stopped on something else.

  He didn’t recognize it at first—it looked so different from the way it had looked the last time he’d seen it and so different from the way it was supposed to look. Only its height was the same: four feet. The largest members of the species, Karl had been told, weighed 110 pounds. This one must have weighed twice that. Its hands had thickened, and the skin on them looked chunky, like raw hamburger microwaved gray. The musculature was all wrong. It was thick like a man’s, not lengthy like a chimpanzee’s.

  The chimp was propped up against a desk with its hands in its lap, like a child being read a story. There was blood pooled under its body and a hollow space where its throat had been. Skin hung in rags under its fingernails. Though he would never admit it to anyone, though it wouldn’t go in any report, Karl knew its wounds had been self-inflicted. He knelt down and gently cupped the back of its head. Then he looked at Dr. Feld and his assistant and tried to imagine scenarios in which they bled out fast. He stayed there until Weaver came up to him.

  “Contact Dr. Nast,” Karl said. “Tell him everything’s on hold.”

  When he looked up, Weaver was staring at him. “I thought you knew.” He almost sounded sad.

  “Knew what?”

  Weaver hesitated.

  “Knew what?”

  “Dr. Nast got the go-ahead.”

  “The go-ahead for what?”

  “To start the next trial. They injected the first volunteer two days ago.”

  Karl burned the lab that night. He didn’t wait for instruction. That would only provide them with an excuse to talk him out of it. And he’d already decided to strangle what they were doing in its crib. Because the people he worked for would never stop otherwise. Because, in a way, the chimp had done exactly what it was supposed to do.

  Some things don’t burn right, and the lab burned like the whole world was on fire. Everything twisted in agony—the flames inflicting the damage and the structure suffering it. Blue-black smoke blotted out the moon and ruined the sky.

  Karl stood deep in the woods in case anyone came. But no one ever did.

  CHAPTER 2

  (Three years later)

  When Tom turned onto Antoine Street, he almost did something that would get him killed. He almost stopped walking.

  Forty yards ahead, the man he was following had frozen again. Like the last time, Benjamin Kotesh had turned and was looking up at the rooftops—just staring. Unlike the last time, he had the look an animal gets when it hears something, feels its mortality.

  Antoine Street was a narrow passage between two rows of buildings that rose up like oil tankers about to converge. It was a tight place, and the prostitutes and addicts orbiting Moulin Rouge gave it a tight feeling. No one, however, had accosted Kotesh on the way over. No one asked him for money. No one offered him a room. People can sense another person’s criminality only when it exceeds their own. And even the Albanian pimps leaning on SUVs seemed to sense that as the man in the gray suit passed, something in the area was worse than they were.

  Kotesh still hadn’t moved. There were no alleys to step into, so he had no choice but to keep walking up to the one person he didn’t want to see him. But Kotesh’s eyes never came down to street level, even as he started turning around and around.

  He thinks someone is following him from the rooftops.

  Which was impossible—the alleys that split through the neighborhood were at least thirty feet across.

  Tom didn’t look up. Didn’t do anything to draw attention. He couldn’t risk it. He was by himself, and no one knew he was here. Two hours ago he’d been in his office at the US embassy in Paris. Then he’d walked out the door to hunt down a French citizen, thereby breaking the laws of both countries.

  Kotesh pulled the duffel bag he was carrying tight against his body and put his hand inside his jacket, right where a gun would be. Then he was moving again. When the neighborhood began to get expensive, Kotesh started raising a cell phone to his ear and lowering it, over and over. Whoever was supposed to be on the other end wasn’t picking up.

  After four calls went unanswered, he gave up on the phone and pushed through a glass door into the marbled lobby of his building. From a shadow between the streetlights, Tom stared at the windows on the fifth floor. He had followed Kotesh here yesterday. It had taken him three years to get to yesterday.

  Now he stood, waiting for the lights to go on. Five minutes passed. Yesterday it had only taken two.

  In one window, light flashed. A muzzle flash could look like so many things that Tom wasn’t sure what he’d seen. But he had a couple seconds to decide whether to do something about it. Fact: Kotesh had to lead him to the other men. This wasn’t a hope or a wish or a plan. This was a need.

  He did something.

  If there were others in the apartment with Kotesh, he needed to know. So he crossed the street and rang Kotesh’s buzzer several times—long rings, urgent—and shouted into the intercom, “Police. Ouvrez.”

  He darted back across the street and watched Kotesh’s apartment from the shadows. No one came to the windows. No lights came on.

  Now he had a choice. But it was one he’d made three years ago.

  There were two security cameras in the lobby, so he scanned the side of the building. His eyes stopped on the fire escape, the bottom of which hung fifteen feet off the ground, one and a half times the height of a basketball hoop.

  He could make that.

  He looked around to make sure no one was watching, then sprinted at the building. He ran two steps up the side of it before he was close enough to lunge for the fire escape. His fingertips caught the bottom rung. He pulled himself up and waited for his breath to slow. Then he put on thin leather gloves and climbed through the window to the stairwell.

  At Kotesh’s door, he turned the knob. To his surprise—and then concern—the door smoothed inward. He stared into the spaceless murk beyond it.

  He slipped inside before there was time to think abo
ut what he was doing. And as he did, his skin crawled from his ankles to the back of his skull. He waited for his eyes to adjust. One second of silence stretched into two. Two into four.

  He listened into the silence, felt into the emptiness. And for a moment, nothing else about him existed: the family he once had, his odds of survival, his anger, his sadness.

  From the foyer, he could see every room in the apartment was clear except the bedroom—it loomed unknown behind its closed door. He eased the door open. An orange haze emanated in from the streetlight outside.

  The room had been decorated to conceal the identity of its true occupants. Along the walls hung framed photos of a newlywed couple hugging in various rain forests, beaches, and ski slopes. They did not live here.

  On the floor in a loose pile were the bodies of seven men.

  The blood curdling out of their nostrils and caked to their clothes was dry. They’d been dead for hours before Kotesh rushed back to join them. One man was staring in his direction, not seeming dead so much as paused, as if at any moment he would snap eyes on Tom and grin.

  There were bullet holes in some of the bodies, but the rest looked like they’d been crash-tested. Limbs were bent unnaturally. Joints had succumbed to the random cruelty of momentum. Whoever had murdered a roomful of men who were themselves murderers had shot some and beaten the rest to death. And whoever it was, he must have come and gone through the roof—just like Kotesh thought.

  The window facing the alley was open, and the breeze made the curtains rise and fall in little breaths. Tom stuck his head out and saw fifteen feet of brick in every direction. There was no way someone could have come and gone through this window.

  Yet someone had.

  He searched the pile of bodies and found Kotesh. The forces that had powered Kotesh’s face, lighting up his eyes, giving him expression, had quit. Like a vacuum cleaner that exceeded the length of its cord.

  He grabbed both of Kotesh’s hands and checked them. His own hands shook a little as he did this. But there were no scars on Kotesh. This wasn’t the man he really wanted. Or at least not the one he wanted most of all.