Zig Zag (56 page)

"That's
not what Harrison says."

"He's
lying."

Or
is it you that's lying?
Still
staring at her old professor, Elisa tucked her hair behind her ears
and dried the tears that streamed down her face while recounting
those awful memories. Blanes, she sincerely hoped, would not have
been so stupid.
Either
way, it's too late now.

Blanes
took over.

"What
really matters right now is updating you all on what we know.
Reinhard and I have found out several things. We obtained information
from confidential reports that were leaked; this is secret but
verifiable information—"

"David,
you know they're listening in right now," Elisa warned.

"I
know, but it doesn't matter. They aren't the ones I'm most concerned
about. I'm going to give you some new information. We didn't want to
tell you anything until we had proof, and we still don't have much,
but Sergio's death made us realize it was time to lay our cards on
the table. We don't have a whole lot of news, just a few haphazard
particulars, but I think everyone's case is pretty similar. Let's
start with yours, Jacqueline." He gestured toward the
paleontologist. "They brainwashed Jacqueline for the first time
when we left New Nelson. She spent a month on the Aegean base, where
they purged her memory using drugs and hypnosis. But after her second
... what do they call it? ... 'reintegration'... After her second
reintegration, she started to remember things."

"Unfortunately,"
Clissot threw in.

"No,
not unfortunately," Blanes corrected. "The lies would have
done you more harm." He turned to the others. "At first,
Jacqueline saw only jumbled, fragmented images. But when we sent her
the first autopsy reports, she began to remember concrete details.
Like the things she found on Rosalyn Reiter's body. Why don't you
tell us about that, Jacqueline?"

Clissot
rested her elbows on the table and pressed her fingertips together,
inspecting her hands under the lamp's dim glow as if they were a
fragile work of art. Then she did something that—oddly—sent
a shiver down Elisa's back. She smiled. The entire time she spoke,
she wore a tense, horrid grin.

"Fine.
Well, I didn't have the proper equipment to do an autopsy on the
island, but I still found ... things. At first, it just seemed like
what you'd expect: intense erythema and eschars resulting from the
joule heat—that's the heat produced from an electric current.
She had burns and markings on her right hand from the cables, her
body showed signs of metallization... all that was normal,
considering the fact that she received a five-hundred-volt shock. But
beneath the burns, I found other markings that bore no relation to
electricity: mutilations, parts of her body that had been cut and
even ripped off... And there were things about her body's state of
preservation that made no sense at all. I wanted to tell Carter about
it, but that's when the explosion occurred. It happened when I was on
my way back to the barracks, so I wasn't hurt at all. I even helped
evacuate the rest of the team."

"Keep
going," Blanes prodded.

"Well,
before we left, Carter asked me to take a look at... at what was in
the pantry. I'm a forensic anthropologist, but when I saw that, I
lost it entirely. It was like it blinded me. I couldn't see clearly
after that, until David's reports jarred my memory." Jacqueline
traced circles on the table with her finger as she smiled, as if the
conversation amused her. "For instance, I saw half a face on the
floor, I think it was Cheryl's, and it had been sectioned, layer by
layer, sliced neatly like ... like the pages of a book. I'd never
seen anything like that in my life, and I have no idea
what
could
possibly do that. Certainly not a hatchet or even a knife. Ric
Valente? No ... I don't know who could have possibly done that, or
who gutted her and smeared her blood all over the walls, the ceiling,
the floor, I mean every inch of the room was covered, like paint. I
don't know who, or how, but it certainly wasn't your average Joe..."
She fell silent.

"And
then I sent you Craig's and Nadja's reports," Blanes was gently
prodding, trying to get her to keep talking.

"Yes,
then there was more. Colin's brain, for example, had been removed and
sliced into thin layers. His entrails had been ripped out and
replaced with other extremities that had been amputated, as though
... as though it was a game of some kind, and his blood was all over
the living room, which had also been totaled. And Nadja's head had
been carved. Her cranium was filed so far down it was unrecognizable
... The kind of trench of a thing that takes water years to form a
rock; no machine could have done it so fast. Bizarre things like
that..."

"And
there were a few surprises in those test results, too, weren't
there?" Blanes asked when she fell silent again. The
paleontologist nodded.

"Their
livers showed no glycogen, not a trace. The lack of autolysis in the
pancreas and absence of lipids in the suprarenal capsules would
indicate slow, lengthy agony. And the level of catecholamines in the
blood confirm that, too. I don't know if this is all a bit too
technical for you, Victor. When a person is tortured, the body
undergoes an enormous amount of stress, and the glands over the
kidneys—the suprarenal capsules—secrete catecholamines,
which bring on tachycardia, increased blood pressure, and other
physical changes designed to protect us. The level of these hormones
in the blood can essentially reveal the degree of suffering the
person has endured, and tell us how long it lasted. But Colin's and
Nadja's test results were totally impossible, comparable to prisoners
of war who have undergone very prolonged torture. The suprarenal
glandular tissue was so enlarged it seemed to have been working at
capacity for an extended period of time, and that points to ...
weeks, maybe months, of torture." Victor swallowed.

"That
doesn't make any sense." He cast a glance at the others,
disconcerted.

"It's
true, it bears no relation to how fast they died," Blanes
corroborated, validating Victor's shock. "For example, Cheryl
Ross had only been in the pantry for two hours. Stevenson, who was
there when Craig found her body, didn't leave his post by the
trapdoor, and he didn't see or hear anything out of the ordinary
while he was stationed there. But Elisa said that she could hear
someone's steps in the pantry at night. So how could Valente manage
to get in without being seen and do everything he supposedly did to
Ross that fast, and in total silence? Besides, there was no sign of
intruders, no weapons were found, nothing. And, of course, there are
no witnesses, not a single one, and I don't mean just eyewitnesses.
No one even
heard
anything.
No cries, noises, shouting, nothing. Not even in Nadja's case, and
she was savagely butchered in a matter of minutes, in an apartment
with very thin walls."

Elisa
paid very close attention. Some of what she heard was new to her,
too.

"And
yet..." Blanes leaned over the table, still staring at Victor.
The lamplight accentuated his features. "Every person who saw at
least one of the crime scenes, every single one, including the
authorities and specialists, went into some sort of shock. That's
what they're calling it, though they don't know exactly what it is.
The symptoms range from a temporary state of alienation—like
Stevenson and Craig in the pantry—to sudden panic and
anxiety—like Reinhard at the trapdoor—to a state of
psychosis that doesn't respond to any standard treatment."

"But
the crimes were atrocious," Victor protested. "I mean,
of
course
people
would react that way..."

"No."
They all turned to look at Jacqueline Clissot. "I'm a forensic
examiner, Victor, I do this all the time. But when I went down to
that pantry and saw Cheryl's remains, I was totally traumatized."

"What
we're trying to say is that the reaction is not a hundred percent
related to the degree of horror," Blanes stated. "These
reactions are totally abnormal, even after seeing things that
disturbing. Think about it: the soldiers, for example, are
experienced men..."

"I
get it," Victor said. "Still, the reactions are unusual,
but not impossible."

"I
know that," Blanes said, narrowing his eyes. "I still
haven't told you the impossible part. Listen to this."

HARRISON
knew
that perfection meant protection.

You
could say he was just a workaholic, but those who knew him best (or
as close to "best" as Harrison ever let anyone get) would
have had the chicken-and-egg debate about it. Did he end up like that
because of his job, or had he chosen his job because he was like
that?

Harrison
himself didn't know the answer. His professional and personal lives
overlapped. He'd gotten married and divorced, spent twenty years as
head of security for scientific projects, had a daughter who lived
far away and whom he never saw, and all that just made him more aware
of the "sacrifices" he'd made. And that awareness was
exactly what made him so good at his job. Harrison knew he was doing
"the right thing." He was protecting; that was what he did.
If he didn't eat, or sleep, if he aged fifteen years overnight and
had no free time, all that was the price you paid to "protect"
others. It was a role most people on the world's stage didn't want to
play, and Harrison had taken the lead.

"No
cracks." That was how his superiors described him. He was a man
who had no cracks. Regardless of what that expression might mean to
other people, Harrison saw himself as armor plating. Just as dogs
take after their owners, eventually men take after their jobs. And as
head of Eagle Group's project security, Harrison knew that what he
had to do was create a field of armor-plated protection around his
clients. Nothing could penetrate it. Nothing in, nothing out.

And
everything had been all right until ten years ago, when Zig Zag
somehow managed to breach a gap.

He
thought about that as he left the house in Soto del Real very late
that night, accompanied by three other men. The March night was far
colder in the mountains surrounding Madrid than it was in the city,
but Harrison was used to far worse, and as soon as he got into the
car he was comfortable once more. It was a Mercedes S-Class W
Special, the body as black and shiny as a transvestite's stilettos,
the windows reinforced with thermoplastic and the body with Kevlar. A
9.5-millimeter bullet fired at the windshield at three thousand feet
per second would do no more damage than a kamikaze insect flying into
the screen. A hand grenade, mortar, or IED
might
incapacitate
the vehicle, but no one traveling in the car would be hurt too badly.
Harrison felt good in that bunker on wheels. Not 100 percent safe
("Safety is knowing that you're never safe," he told his
disciples), but reasonably good, which is all any reasonable man
could aspire to.

The
driver pulled out immediately, maneuvering skillfully between two
other cars and a van parked in front of the house, and slipped into
the dark night with the silence of a satellite. It was 1:45, the
stars twinkled in the sky, the road was empty, and even the most
pessimistic estimate put them at the airport in half an hour: plenty
of time to greet the new arrival.

Harrison
pondered.

After
a few minutes, sitting still as a statue, he took his hand out of his
jacket pocket. "Hand me the monitor."

The
man sitting on his left passed him an object that looked like a bar
of Belgian chocolate. It was a five-inch flat-screen TFT monitor with
high-definition resolution good enough to make you swear you had a
movie theater in the palm of your hand. The menu had four options:
computer, TV, GPS, and videoconference. Harrison selected the last
one and then clicked on the "Integrated Systems" option. It
beeped, and immediately the L-shaped room where the four scientists
sat chatting popped up on the screen. In spite of the weak light, the
image was extraordinarily crisp and the color of their clothes and
hair was easily discernible. The sound quality was superb. Harrison
could choose from two angles, since there were two different hidden
cameras filming. But neither of them had a clear shot of Elisa
Robledo from straight on, so he settled for a profile, from the
right. Jacqueline Clissot was speaking.