"Totally. And I appreciate your honesty." He heard her exhale deeply. "I'm not going to do anything with this knife, I swear. I just need it right now, the same way I need you. You'll understand soon enough. In fact, if this all works out how I hope, then in a few hours, you'll understand and you'll believe me."
She sounded so convinced that it sent a shiver down Victor's spine. One lonely road sign announced the turnoff for Colmenar. He got off the highway and took a narrow two-lane road as dark and perilous as his thoughts. Elisa's voice carried on, dreamlike.
"I'll tell it to you how they told it to me. After the helicopter trip, I woke up on another island, in the Aegean. It's better for you if you don't know the name. At first, I hardly saw anyone, just a few men in white coats. They told me that the Impact had made Cheryl Ross lose her mind and she'd taken her own life when she went down into the pantry in the cellar, back on New Nelson. I couldn't believe it. It was too absurd. I'd just spoken to her, and I knew it wasn't true."
Victor interrupted her to ask the one question that was burning in his mind.
"What about Ric?"
"They refused to tell me anything about him. For the first week, they did nonstop tests: blood tests, urine tests, X-rays, sonograms, the works. And I didn't get to see anyone. I started to lose my patience. I spent most of my time locked up in a room. They'd taken my clothes and I was under constant observation. Everything I did, every move I made, it was like being in a zoo." Elisa's voice trembled. She was overcome by the sickening memory. "I couldn't get dressed, I had nowhere to hide. The excuse they gave me was that they had to make sure I was OK—this, and everything else, through a loudspeaker; no one ever came in to speak to me in person. They said it was like quarantine. I held out for a while, but by the end of the second week I couldn't take it anymore. I lost it. Kicked and screamed, the whole nine yards, until finally someone came and agreed to give me a robe, and then they brought Harrison, the guy who was with Carter when I signed the contract in Zurich. I didn't want to see him, he was such an awful man: brusque, pale, and he had the coldest look you can imagine. But he was the one who told me what he called 'the truth.'" She paused. "I'm sorry, Victor. You're not going to like this."
"Don't worry," he said, half closing his eyes, as if they, and not his ears, were what was about to receive the bad news.
"He told me that Ric Valente had murdered both Rosalyn Reiter and Cheryl Ross."
Victor began whispering something about God, mouthing words almost silently, perhaps commending his soul. After all, despite everything, Ric had been his best friend as a kid. Poor Ric.
"The Impact had affected him more than any of us. That Saturday night in October he left his room, after throwing together that dummy with the pillow to make it look like he was still in bed, and probably lured Rosalyn into the control room with a lie. Then he beat her and hurled her against the generator. And then he did something no one could have guessed. He hid in one of the refrigerators in the cellar. It must have broken down when everything short-circuited. Anyway, he hid there while the soldiers carried out their search, and no one found him. Then when Cheryl Ross went down to take inventory, he hacked her to pieces. He got a knife or an ax somewhere; that's why there was all that blood all over the place. And after he killed her, he committed suicide. Colin Craig discovered both bodies when he went into the pantry looking for her. Minutes later, by chance, the helicopter crashed. And that was that."
The news of Ric's death didn't affect Victor Lopera; he already knew about it. He'd known for ten years, but until then the only version he'd heard and tried to picture was the "official" one. That his childhood friend had been killed in an explosion at a Zurich laboratory.
"It might sound like a pretty dubious explanation to you," Elisa continued, "but at least it was an explanation, and that was all I wanted. Besides, Ric really did die: they found his body in the pantry, they had a funeral, his parents were notified. Of course, it was all confidential. My family, my friends, and the rest of the world only heard that there had been an explosion in Blanes's lab in Zurich. The only victims were Rosalyn Reiter, Cheryl Ross, and Ric Valente. They covered their tracks. They even produced a real explosion in Zurich—with no victims, of course—so there wouldn't be any loose ends. And we were sworn to secrecy. We weren't allowed to talk to each other, weren't even allowed to stay in contact. For a while, once we went back to our normal lives, we were under strict surveillance. According to Harrison, it was all 'for our own good.' The Impact could have other unknown side effects, so we'd be watched for a sensible length of time, just enough to make a fresh start in life. We were each given a job, a means of supporting ourselves. I went back to Madrid, did my dissertation with Noriega, and became a professor at Alighieri." At that point, she paused for so long that Victor assumed she was done. He was about to say something when she added, "And that's how all my dreams ended, my desire to conduct research, or even work in my field."
"And you never went back to New Nelson?"
"No."
"I'm so sorry. To have to give up on a project like that, after those breakthroughs ... I understand. It must have been awful."
Elisa looked away. Her eyes narrowed, focused on the dark highway. When she replied, there was an edge to her voice. "I've never been so happy about anything in my life."
THEY were both gazing at the flexible screen, spread out like a tablecloth on the white-haired man's legs, as the armor-plated Mercedes they were traveling in sped silently through the night on the Burgos highway. On the screen a red dot, surrounded by a labyrinth of green dots, blinked intermittently.
"Is she taking him to the meeting?" the stocky man asked, uttering his first words for several hours. His thick, gravelly voiced seemed fitting.
"Looks that way."
"Why hasn't she been intercepted?"
"Well there's no record of her having contacted anyone, and I suspect that's because she just recruited him tonight." The white-haired man rolled up the screen and the green glow and blinking red dot disappeared. In the darkness of the backseat, his lips stretched into a thin smile. "That was very clever of her. She managed to throw us off even though her line was tapped. Spoke in some code that only this guy understood. They're a lot sneakier than last time, Paul."
"Good for them."
That response made Harrison glance over at Paul Carter questioningly, but Carter had already turned back to the window.
"At any rate, the intrusion of... a new element... won't require us to change our plans," Harrison added. "She and her friend will soon be with us. And in tonight's game of chess, the only piece that concerns me is the German pawn."
"Has he left yet?"
"He's about to, but unlike her, he will be intercepted. Along with everything he's carrying."
And suddenly, the crisis began. It was immediate, unexpected. Harrison didn't realize it (because it was happening to him), but Carter did, though at first it was barely noticeable. All he saw was Harrison daintily unrolling the computer screen again, as though it was a delicate flower petal with a wasp he wanted to trap buzzing inside it. Then he touched it and chose an option from the menu: a beautiful face filled the screen, framed in black. Laid out floppily on Harrison's thighs, the face looked like it was melting: a hill, a valley, another hill.
It was Professor Elisa Robledo's face.
Harrison grabbed the face with both hands, and suddenly Carter knew what was happening.
A crisis.
All trace of emotion had disappeared from Harrison's face. Not just the kindness he'd shown chatting to the young driver at the airport or the coldness of his phone conversation, but literally every single sign of feeling or emotion. His features had been robbed of life. The man driving the Mercedes couldn't see them in the darkness of the car's interior, and Carter was relieved. If he'd looked in the rearview mirror and seen Harrison (or seen Harrison's face) at that moment, he'd have crashed.
Carter had witnessed several of these attacks. Harrison call
ed them "panic attacks." He claimed he'd been dealing with "all this" for too many years, said he wanted to retire. But Carter knew there was something else to it. The attacks were always worse after certain events.
Milan. This is because of what we saw in Milan.
He wondered why he wasn't worse himself and finally deduced that it was because he couldn't possibly get any worse.
"There are some things that no one should see ... ever," Harrison said, recovering, rolling up the screen again and placing it back into his overcoat.
You're telling me. Carter didn't reply. He just kept looking out the window. No spectator (though there were none) could ever tell that he was affected by what he'd seen.
But he was. Paul Carter was afraid.
"WAIT! I think I get it!"
"No, there's no way you get it yet."
"Yes, I do ... Wait a minute. Sergio Marini's death ... The news on TV today, I was the one who called to tell you..." Victor opened his mouth and almost jumped out of his seat. "Elisa, you put two and two together, right? Now I see. You had a truly horrible experience, I know ... Three of your colleagues died because another one went insane... But that was ten years ago!"
She listened carefully. And now it all made sense to him: Elisa needed his words and his comfort more than she needed him to drive her down dark, winding lanes at night. Her memories were the only thing actually after her. She was absolutely terrified of a bunch of things that were dead and gone. There was a name for that, right? Post-traumatic stress disorder. Marini's murder was just a terrible coincidence, and it had sparked the whole thing off. What should he do? The thing that would help her the most would be to make her see that.
"Think it through," he said calmly. "Ric Valente already had plenty of reasons to be unstable, and I can assure you that I'm not surprised to hear that the Impact, or whatever it was, brought his worst instincts to the surface. But he's dead, Elisa. You can't..." Suddenly, another idea flashed through his mind. "Wait a minute ... We're on our way to meet the others, aren't we?" Her silence confirmed he was right. He decided to venture on. "The rest of the Zig Zag team. Of course ... You're meeting tonight. Marini's death made you all think that... that another one of you had lost your minds, the way Ric did ... But if that were true, shouldn't you be trying to get help?"
"Who's going to help us, Victor?" she asked, in the saddest, bleakest voice he'd ever heard. "No one."
"The government... the authorities ... Eagle Group."
"They're the ones after us. Don't you see? That's who we're running from."
"But why?"
"Because they're trying to help us." With each sentence, Elisa seemed to be making less sense, getting more scrambled, mired deeper in turmoil. "When we get to the meeting, it'll all make sense. We're almost there. The exit is just after this stretch..."
He was distracted for a moment by two curves in the road. The names of the towns they passed all blurred in his mind: Cerceda, Manzanares el Real, Soto del Real... Faint lights were dotted throughout the black fields, sometimes clustered in what must have been little villages. The scenery would have been beautiful in the daylight (Victor had traveled through here before), but at night it was like meandering through the ruins of a huge, haunted cathedral. It's frightening how insignificant the distance separating man from terror really is, Victor realized. Three hours ago, he'd been watering his aeroponic plants, in his comfortable apartment in Ciudad de los Periodistas, and look at him now. Driving along a dark road with a woman who might be deranged.
"Why are you armed?" He tried to think fast. "Is Eagle Group our enemy?"
"No, our enemy is much worse ... unfathomably worse."
He took another curve, the headlights casting their beams on the trees.
"What do you mean by that? Wasn't Ric the one who—"
"That was bullshit. They lied."
"But then—"
"Victor," she said harshly, staring at him, "for the past ten years, someone has been murdering everyone who was on that fucking island..."
He was about to reply, but as he turned into another bend in the road, his headlights shone on a car blocking their way.
21
HIS right foot took over entirely.
His mind didn't go blank. He had time to ask himself a few questions, to register Elisa's scream, invoke both God and his parents, and have a terrible realization: we're going to die.
The mass of metal blocking the highway raced toward the windshield as if it were moving, rather than his car. Victor put all his weight behind his right foot as it plunged into the pedal beneath him. In his ears, Elisa's cries and the sound of tires screeching blended into one incredibly sharp, piercing note, like a chorus of terrified lunatics. There were two strokes of luck: the curve was not a tight one, and the car was a short distance away. Still, despite his sharp turn to the left, the right side of the car smashed into the driver's door of the other vehicle. For a fraction of a second, he was elated. Whoever that asshole is, I showed him. Then they reached the shoulder and he had a realization: beyond them were a few trees and then a steep slope. Yes, Victor, you're on a mountain. A steep slope. Practically a cliff. But the world came to a halt at the safety barricade. It wasn't really a crash. The air bags didn't even deign to inflate. Newtonian inertia slightly jiggled their bodies, and then all was calm.
"God!" Victor shouted, as if "God" were an insult to make truckers blush. He turned to Elisa. "You OK?"
"I think so..."
His legs were trembling (after having done its duty, his right foot had turned to Jell-O), but his hands were in control. He unfastened his seat belt, muttering, "Jerk... I'm going to report that idiot... He'll be sorry..." He was about to open the door when something stopped him.
For a second, he thought that the light shining through his window and blinding him was coming from the other car, but it was floating in the air and had no motor attached to it.
"It's them," Elisa murmured.
"Them?"
"The people following us."
A black leather fist banged on the window.
"Out!" the fist shouted.
"Hey, wait a minute!...
Anger was a common response for Victor, but he was anything but angry. At that precise moment, he was terrified. He didn't want to leave the car's protective interior, but he was scared to disobey Black Fist. His fear was schizophrenic, simultaneously hissing, "Don't do it," and yet also whispering, "Do as you are told."
Dark suits with jacket tails fluttering in the wind filed past his high beams.
"Don't get out," Elisa said. "I'll talk to them."
She rolled her window down manually. An unknown face appeared, in a sliver of light. Elisa and the face spoke in English.
"Professor Lopera has nothing to do with this ... Let him go..."
"He has to come too, now."
"I'm telling you..."
"Don't make this any more difficult than it already is, please."
While he witnessed that rather formal discussion, night suddenly entered his side of the car. They had somehow managed to open his door, though he didn't recall having unlocked it. Nothing separated him from Black Fist now.
"Get out, Professor."
A hand clamped onto his arm. The words stuck in his throat. No one had ever touched him like that before. His relationships were based on courtesy and a polite personal distance. The hand yanked, dragging him out. Now, mixed in with the fear assailing him, he also felt the outrage of an upstanding citizen unfairly hassled by the authorities.
"Hey! Just a minute! What right do you have—Let's go."
There were two men, one bald and the other blond. Baldy was doing all the talking. Victor was pretty sure Blondie couldn't even speak Spanish.
Of course, he didn't need to.
Blondie had a gun.
THE house, situated a few miles from Soto del Real, was just as she remembered it. The only changes she noticed were that the inside seemed slightly run-down now, and there was
more construction in the area than there had been. But it still had the peaked roof, white walls, porch, and old swimming pool. It was nighttime, but it had been dark the first time, too.
Everything was the same, but it was all different, too, because the first time she'd felt hopeful, and now she had no hope, had resigned herself entirely.
The room they locked her in was a small bedroom that looked like it hadn't been used in years. There was no decor whatsoever, just a sheetless bed, a nightstand, a lamp with a naked bulb providing the only light, and an old wooden chest of drawers, warped with age. Oh, and a man built like a brick house, arms folded across his chest, wearing a dark suit and an earpiece while he blocked the door. Elisa had tried speaking to him, but it was like talking to a wall.
As she paced the desolate room, watched by her keeper, her thoughts were all focused on one thing, the most important of the many that should be concerning her: Victor. I'm so sorry. So, so sorry.
She had no idea where they'd taken him. She guessed he was somewhere in the house, too, but the men who had ambushed them split them up, forcing Victor into another car. She was driven in Victor's car, after they'd confiscated that stupid knife, of course (what had she been thinking, grabbing that thing?). Nevertheless, she felt convinced they'd been brought to the same place, and that Victor had arrived first. They were probably interrogating him at that very moment. Poor Victor.
She promised herself that she'd get him out of there if it was the last thing she did. Getting her friend tangled up in this had been a tragic mistake on her part, a failing. She swore that she'd pay any price, including her life, to free him. But first she'd have to find the answers to a few questions. For example, why had she gotten the call if the meeting place was not secure? And how had they even found out about the meeting? Had the whole thing been a trap from the start?