Then he wasn’t looking at all; he was slumped over the railing. Taraval stood behind him, waving to Sylvia, a large wrench in his hand. She saw him wipe the bloody tool on the poor man’s overalls, and tasted vomit in her mouth.
Her kidnapper stepped up to the console. He lowered the shipping container back to the earth, detached the magnet, then positioned it right above her. She heard the hum of the magnet as it turned on. Her feet, bound in metal-bearing tape, slowly rose to meet it. She tried pulling her legs free, but it felt as if she had been cast in concrete below the knee. Taraval raised the crane, dangling Sylvia upside down like a prize catch at a weigh-in. Blood rushed to her head as the distance between her and the hard cement below became ominously greater. She began to feel dizzy. Soon enough, the dead conductor appeared in her field of vision, Taraval standing behind him. He tapped the console, halting the magnet so that they were eye to eye, though on opposite ends of the vertical axis.
He reached up and gently removed the tape from her mouth. It flew from his hands to the hook, drawn by its immense magnetic pull. He smiled at this.
“Impressive, isn’t it? Simple, yet powerful.” He gently patted the crane. “Like teleportation. Our life’s work—it shall set us free.”
Sylvia spit—out of disgust, and to clear her mouth. “Is this really your plan, Bill?” she asked. “You’re going to port us like a piece of furniture? This is an inorganic TC—without the right calculations, we’ll end up as heaps of flesh and bone on the other side. You may as well just drop me from here; I’ll have a better chance of surviving that than what you’re proposing!”
“Flesh and bone. Sylvia, you have the poet’s flair. Your presence in the future is optional, my dear. I’m content to borrow your access privileges to Honeycomb, since Corina has so ungraciously locked me out. I simply have to enable your comms and the magic shall commence.”
“And then what? They’ll just find you in the glacier, Bill.”
He chuckled, as if indulging a child. “Is teleportation not the literal manifestation of God’s gift to mankind? A human disappears from his burial tomb, then appears somewhere else. Mary Magdalene can’t believe her eyes. Luke is dumbfounded, he thinks Jesus is a ghost, and so Jesus challenges him, ‘Look at My hands and My feet; it is I Myself. Touch Me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones.’” Taraval stared out at the rainy shipping yard, and the river beyond it. “Not quite the Garden Tomb outside Jerusalem, my dear, but one generally does not get to choose the site of their resurrection. They won’t find me until I reemerge. For that, I took a page out of the Gehinnomites’ book. When I researched this Pulsa D’nura, I discovered gematria. Ever hear of it?”
Thanks to me and my love of trivia, she had. Gematria was an old Jewish system of assigning numerical value to letters and words, for the purposes of divining a thing’s “essential power.” “You’re going to encrypt yourself, Bill?” she asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Clever girl!” He laughed. “None shall find me until the day, many months or years hence, when I shall reappear, resurrected from the glacier. My very own Second Coming.”
A BORROWED SWORD
THE LEVANTINE SEDAN pulled to a stop outside the Central Park Zoo. A large black luxury van was parked out front. This being July Fourth, the zoo entrance was crowded with families and kids all wanting to see the animals.
“Zaki, clipboard!” Moti yelled as he exited our car. Zaki followed, holding out the antique item as he made his way to their welcoming committee—a detachment of seven Levantine operatives who emerged from the back of the black van. They all wore tactical operations vests and had the faces of seasoned experts. Further evidence, as if we needed any, that Joel2 and I never really had Moti; he’d had us all along.
I wondered just then how close we had come to death. If we hadn’t figured out what Moti was up to, would he have kept us alive?
“Come, come,” Moti said, ushering us toward the van. Joel2 and I got out, walking to the nearly bus-sized transport. The inside was lined with at least a dozen seats against the walls, as well as a command center with plenty of consoles. Unlike the LAST Agency office where I had first met Moti, there was no attempt here to deceive any visitors. The van’s interior had all the trimmings one would expect of a high-end spy operation.
Zaki handed Moti his clipboard, then quietly conferred with a stern-faced raven-haired woman at the command console. After they seemed to agree about whatever she’d told him, Zaki announced to the group, “A male and female matching William Taraval and Sylvia Byram were recorded near the Chelsea Piers freight TC.”
“Time to departure?” Moti asked.
“Five, ten minutes,” Zaki answered.
“Make it five!” barked Moti. He took a drag of his cigarette and turned to us. “Good suggestion. Now you wait here and—God willing—we will return with your wife. In the meantime, you two have much to discuss.”
“Hold it,” I said. “Are you seriously trying to feed us some variation of We’ll take it from here? You really think we’re going to stay here with the red pandas while you take out Taraval and try not to get our wife killed in the process?”
“Nobody is killing anyone,” Moti said conclusively.
“We’re coming,” said Joel2.
“No.” Moti shook his head.
“We are coming,” Joel2 reiterated. “In the past forty-eight hours, we’ve been killed, resurrected—”
“Replicated,” I added.
“Kidnapped,” Joel2 said.
“Poisoned—”
“And bludgeoned.”
“We’re coming,” I stated.
Moti took an impatient drag of his cigarette, then exhaled a plume of smoke in our direction.
“Team, to me!” he shouted.
Is that supposed to be a yes?
Zaki, Ifrit, the raven-haired woman, and the other seven Levantine occupants of the van gathered around him. It was a credit to their training that not one of them did a double take at me or Joel2.
“Our target, as you know, is a man named William Taraval,” he said, sending a dossier to their comms with a gesture. “If you have ever heard the term mad scientist, that is who we’re looking for. But make no mistake: mad or not, he is a very smart individual. He knows how to play the game, and if we find him, then we must assume it’s because he’s not hiding. Expect him to expect us. What we have to be careful of isn’t some weapon that he may be brandishing, but this man’s mind. His mind is his weapon. And speaking of weapons, use yours only as a last resort! Killing someone will not only end this mission; it will end our mission. We need this man alive. I don’t need a dead body: I want a live mind. Without his capture, we fail.”
“What about Sylvia?” I asked.