Zig Zag (44 page)

"Still..."

"Oh,
Victor..." she sighed, sneaking a glance at him. "You don't
believe a word of this, do you?"

"Of
course I believe you. The island, the experiments, the images ...
It's just... it's too much to take in all in one night."

"You
think I'm hallucinating or something."

"No!
That's not true."

"Do
you even believe there was a Project Zig Zag?"

The
question made him stop and think. Did he? She'd told him everything
in plenty of detail, but had he accepted it? Had that constant stream
of mind-blowing information cleared his cerebral channels? And the
hardest question: had he accepted what it meant if she was actually
telling him the truth?
The
ability to see the past
...
the sequoia theory ... Time strings opened and viewed, their present
images transformed into images from the past. It seemed ... possible
... unlikely ... fantastic ... rational... absurd. If it were true,
then the history of humankind had changed forever. But how could he
believe it? Up until that moment, what he knew was what the rest of
his colleagues knew: that Blanes's theory was mathematically
attractive but had an exceedingly slim chance of ever being proven.
And as for the rest of it (mysterious shadows, unexplained deaths,
white-eyed ghosts), if it were all based on an idea that struck him
as crazy, how could he believe it? He decided to be honest.

"OK,
I don't believe it all... I mean, it's just too much to handle, the
idea that for the past half an hour I've been hearing about the
greatest discovery since relativity, right here in my car, on the
ride up to Burgos ... I'm sorry, I just can't... I can't take it all
in. But by the same token, I can say I believe
you.
In
spite of... the way you're acting, Elisa." He swallowed hard and
then confessed all. "I have to be honest with you. A lot of
things have been going through my head tonight ... I mean, I still
don't even know
who
we're
running from, or why you're carrying a... a small machete around with
you ... It's all pretty shocking, and frankly, I have my doubts ...
about you, about me. What you're suggesting, the way you're acting,
it's just all so mysterious. It's like the hardest cryptogram I've
ever tried to crack. But I think I have a solution. And my solution
says, I believe
you,
but
right now I don't believe
what
you believe!
Does
that make sense?"

"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 called 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.