The Confessor (4 page)

‘Mom went out to get some stuff. This an okay time?’

‘Sure.’

The boy’s mother had decreed that he was to have no contact with his father or Harry unless she was present – so the secret chats happened once every two or three weeks, using software Harry had created with painstaking detail fueled by paranoia. It was some of his best work.

July Fourth had all been about getting Ezra back to his mother. Harry, Geiger, Lily and Ezra had ended up at the apartment of Martin Corley, Geiger’s psychiatrist – a ragged, besieged troop – and Corley had given them the keys to his car and his home upstate in Cold Spring. That would be the site of the mother-son rendezvous, their ‘safe house’ – but by the time Ezra’s mother had arrived, there was only the boy and Harry alive to greet her.

After the catastrophe in Cold Spring, when the police had run out of questions, Harry, Ezra and his furious, grateful mother had driven back to the city, to Corley’s apartment, where Harry had told the psychiatrist a tale of death and watched something wither inside the man. Mother and son flew home to California, only to discover Ezra had brought a flock of stowaway demons with him – nightmares, sudden bursts of tears, hours sitting in silence – and after a month they’d moved back to New York, into the brownstone on West Seventy-fifth Street where they had lived until the divorce, so Ezra could be in therapy with Corley. His mother felt that Corley, having been Geiger’s shrink, would create some comfort zone for the boy – and Corley agreed.

The boy let loose with a sigh. ‘Good to see you, Harry.’

‘You look good, Ez. The stache is coming along.’

Ezra rubbed the paltry wisps of hair on his lip and frowned. ‘Oh man . . . It looks
sooo
lame – but Mom won’t let me start shaving it yet.’

They needed the chats because they needed each other. They shared the loneliest of things – loss and guilt, like the only survivors to walk away from a plane wreck.

‘Ez . . . talked with Dad lately?’

The boy’s face tightened like a fist. ‘No. Screw him – and Dr. Corley says I’m allowed to still be this pissed.’

‘Gotcha.’ Harry had learned to only ask that question once.

‘I’m gonna go see a movie tomorrow,’ said Ezra. ‘Wanna meet me?’

‘You know I can’t do that, Ez.’

‘Yeah, well . . . I keep asking.’ The boy’s grin grabbed and twisted something inside Harry. ‘I figure one of these days maybe you’ll stop being a totally crazy person and realize somebody isn’t gonna grab you if you walk down the street.’

‘Paranoid is the proper term, Ez. I’m not crazy, I’m paranoid.’

‘I know what paranoid means, Harry. You are wayyyy past that. But don’t worry. I still think you’re cool.’

‘You playing your axe, kid?’

‘Uh-huh. A lot.’

‘Guess you’ll be hitting the concert circuit pretty soon then, huh?’

‘Yeah, right. That’s me. Wanna be my manager? Go on the road together?’

‘I’m there, kid.’ They shared a slow smile, and Harry hid a sigh. His list of small talk had shrunk to nothing. All that was left was the colossal presence hovering between them, the person that would bind them together forever.

‘So . . . you’re doing okay, huh?’ he said instead.

Ezra shrugged. ‘Yeah. Sometimes. I still have the nightmare. Y’know . . . in the boat with Hall. Tipping over. Going under. Dr. Corley says they’ll stop when I understand it wasn’t – my fault.’ The last two words limped out – wretched, unwanted stragglers, runts of the litter. ‘Only thing is – it
was
my fault.’ His eyes suddenly glistened, and tears started down his pale cheeks. ‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ he said, and tried to wipe them away.

Harry felt the gathering of ghosts again – sad, mute witnesses. Of all the loss and wreckage, this was the worst of it – the boy, with a ponderous chain of others’ sins around his slender neck. His father’s, Harry’s, Geiger’s, Hall’s . . . and so many others.

‘Ez, we’ve talked about this. Listen to me. Hall
kidnapped
you. You didn’t do one single thing.’

They’d been here before. Harry considered playing the ‘if’ game again . . .

If
your father hadn’t gotten hold of the torture videos, Geiger would be alive.

If
Harry had read Hall’s job request on the website and decided not to follow it up, Geiger would be alive.

If
Geiger had turned down the job when Harry presented it to him, he would still be alive.

. . . but instead, Harry just said, ‘It
isn’t
your fault, Ez.’

‘Then why is he dead, Harry?’ Ezra looked stricken, sick with remorse. ‘He jumped into the river to save
me
, Harry. He died saving
me
. God . . . I can feel his hands grabbing me, pulling me free, shoving me up to the surface . . .’

Ezra sniffled. Guilt is not something children are meant to feel in great strengths. They’ve not developed antibodies against the virus. They are helpless against the spread of infection. The boy’s shoulders did a slow rise in time with his sigh.

‘I see him, y’know.’

‘What do you mean – ‘see him’?’

‘Happens all the time. He’s crossing the street . . . walking out of a store. I mean – it isn’t
him
– just somebody who looks like him, but for a second I think—’

‘Ezra, I’m back! Dinner in ten!’ It was a woman’s voice.

The boy’s head snapped to the side. ‘Shit . . . gotta go. Bye.’ He grabbed the top of the laptop and swung it down. The screen went dark.

‘Bye,’ Harry mumbled, felt the familiar flinch of helplessness in his gut, and pushed his dinner away. So much damage. Pieces of them all, scattered over the land.

Everything was broken.

The lights were set on dim. The video freeze-frame on the center screen of the monitor bank was a street study of light and dark grays – looking down on figures waiting to be set loose into action. The rest of the room was a fuzzy netherworld of unknown dimensions. The tech pulled at his moustache while he did a habitual, back-and-forth rock in his task chair. It squeaked with each motion.

‘Stop,’ she said from the shadows behind him, and put a hand on the top of chair’s back, freezing it. ‘Do not do that.’

He straightened his glasses on his nose and pointed at the screen. ‘Where’d this come from?’

‘One of our ex-contractors works for NYPD in surveillance. He saw this, had a hunch – thought we might like to see it.’ She leaned down over his shoulder for a closer look.

‘Basic urban surveillance setup,’ the tech said. ‘Cameras on lampposts. Most people don’t even notice them. Low-rez. Lots of bleed. You can get this stuff online at Spies-R-Us.’ He glanced at her, hoping for a grin. She smelled really good.

‘You smell good. Lavender?’

She turned her head the minimal amount of degrees to ensure eye contact.

‘Willie, I’m tired. If you hit on me I will hit you back, and it won’t be a figurative gesture. It will hurt much more than having to listen to one of your dumb lines. Yes?’

‘Yup,’ he said, and straightened up in the chair.

She was used to it. She’d always known she was pretty – ripe cheekbones and an aquiline nose framed by wavy, sand-colored hair – but it was her eyes, a rare violet, like amethyst, and bizarrely bright. ‘Liz Taylor eyes’, her mother called them. They’d been a curse all her life. When she was a child, relatives and friends were forever leaning huge faces down into hers, crunching her cheeks – ‘Look at those
eyes
!’ When puberty came knocking, every female body in her grade seemed to bend and curve except hers – but her eyes stopped every testosterone-soaked teen in his tracks. Now, in her job, they were an unwanted feature, a marker – and could lead to trouble far more dangerous than wrestling in the backseat of a car. She took hazel contact lenses with her when she went into the field.

‘Let’s go, champ,’ she said. ‘Do your stuff.’

The tech punched the console and the surveillance video began to play in slo-mo. A lean figure, dressed in black, jogged into an intersection, his back to the camera.

‘He’s got some kind of limp,’ the tech said. ‘Works around it, sort of.’

‘Yes, he does.’

They watched the runner reach the middle of the intersection when a truck bore down on him. He turned, face not quite three-quarters to the camera. The tech stopped the video, isolated Geiger’s face with a visual grid and enlarged it, bringing it up fullscreen.

‘Nah,’ said the tech. ‘We can do better.’ He let the event continue at quarter-speed – Geiger center-stage, stock-still. ‘So who is this guy?’

‘That’s why I’m here, Willie – to find that out.’

Next month would be her four-year anniversary with Deep Red. The government had recruited her straight out of college, and she’d gone over to Deep Red sixteen months later. Like everyone else in the group, she had known of Geiger – the best interrogator in the world – but had never worked with him. Last year, after the torture videos disaster, Deep Red had classified him as ‘Missing, presumed dead’– but they all knew the label really meant ‘We have no fucking idea what happened to him . . .’

In the surveillance video, Geiger grabbed the driver, spun him round and took control.

The tech nodded. ‘Nice move.’

She had been the one who debriefed Dalton post-event, she’d read the Level Eight Profile, and she’d talked to one of the team that had used Geiger in Cairo back in 2004 – but she still didn’t have a feel for the layers or depth of the
man . . .

The driver’s body suddenly slumped, lifeless, in Geiger’s grasp.

The tech sat up. ‘Wow! You see that?’

‘Play it back and enlarge.’

The tech reversed the video, magnified the men – and they watched again.

‘Watch his hand, Willie. See that? Pressure point. Brachial plexus.’

Geiger turned – and the tech stabbed the keyboard. ‘There!’ He isolated Geiger’s face again, blew it up and filled the large flat-screen with it. The slate-gray eyes above the pitch-black beard stared out at them, past them. It reminded her of a falcon’s gaze, taking in whole vistas without missing one tiny detail. It belonged up in the sky. She handed the tech a DVD. He slid it into the console and the adjacent screen lit with a freeze-frame:

In a windowless, bunker-like room, a swarthy, bearded man lay strapped onto a gurney, dressed only in soiled boxers, shiny with sweat, his face and body spotted with welts and cuts. A man in a short-sleeved white shirt and khaki shorts stood beside him.

‘Hey,’ said the tech. ‘I’ve seen this. This is the secret interrogation Veritas Arcana put on the web – right? The stuff in Cairo . . .’

‘Run it.’

The man in the khaki shorts came alive and stroked his clipped goatee.

‘Nari . . . meet your new friend – the Inquisitor,’ he said, and Geiger walked into frame in a white T-shirt and slacks. He put two fingers to the victim’s neck, as a doctor would check a pulse. The prisoner smoldered as he spoke with a thick Middle Eastern accent.

‘I cannot tell you any more than I already—’

Geiger’s fingers dug into the flesh beneath the jaw. ‘You’re right, Nari, you will not tell me anything – now.’ His voice had the feel of satin and the sound of dominion. ‘Later you will, but it isn’t time yet. For now, it’s best you don’t speak at all.’

Nari’s eyes registered surprise and confusion. ‘But peace is what I was trying to—’

Geiger’s grip tightened, rendering the man mute. ‘Not a word, Nari.’ His fingers dug deeper, and the prisoner’s grimace stretched so wide it looked like a smile. ‘Nod if you understand me?’

The prisoner shook his head. ‘One question,’ he rasped. ‘One.’

Nothing moved on Geiger’s face – more a painted canvas than body and soul. Then he nodded and removed his hand. Nari cleared his throat. The thin, crooked tendrils of tension at the corners of his eyes straightened.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What else is a man to say when he speaks the truth and is not believed?’

Geiger blinked, once. ‘That is what I am here to find out.’

‘Jeez . . .’ said the tech. ‘That is one icy dude. What’s the name again?’

‘Geiger.’

‘And you think it’s him in Brooklyn? Hmm . . . Maybe.’ He started toggling the second video, fast and slow, looking for a matching angle. ‘Didn’t Veritas Arcana say he was dead?’

In the video, Geiger started to walk the room in a slow circle, fingers tapping rhythmically on his thighs. The tech leaned forward.

‘Keep going . . . keep going . . . and turrrrnnn – now!’ Geiger came around to camera and the tech whacked a key. ‘Gotcha!’ He turned the face into a full-screen freeze the same size as its neighbor. ‘Which way you wanna go on this?’

‘The street shot. Lose the beard and give him back his hair.’

Both heads took on a floating, three-dimensional quality as the tech matched angles, and blue dots started popping up on Geiger’s bearded face, white lines connecting them, a malleable web shifting by minute degrees. He played with the lighting, equalizing brightness and shadow. He made Geiger’s hair grow four inches in a second.

‘Too long?’

‘No. But make it wavier.’

She felt the pony-trot kick in her veins, telling her body something before her brain was certain. If it
was
him, she already had her next move. That was her strong suit. Big picture, don’t miss the details. He was a runner, and there was ritual written all over his stride, so she’d get all the NYPD surveillance vids for Brooklyn. There were hundreds of cameras, thousands of hours to view – so how far back should she go? It was nine months since Dalton had carved him up . . . he would’ve needed at least four or five months to heal before he could run again. Going back to November would do it. She’d find him on the videos and track him. She might not nail the place where he lived, but she’d get close. A neighborhood. A street. A block . . .

The tech raised a finger. ‘And now, as they say in Brooklyn –
Voila
!’ He tapped a key and Street-Geiger’s beard disappeared. Then the network of lines and dots was gone.