Chapter 21
They shot him! The thought kept revolving through Reisch’s head. The audacity of it! The indignity of being treated like a common criminal. He was more insulted than hurt, although his right shoulder had bled a fair amount before repairing itself. The only good thing to come out of the last two hours was a clarity of thought. Reisch tried never to lie to himself, and a critical appraisal of his behavior the last few weeks was not flattering. Up until now, there had not been a single trace of him in any file or database, but now they had a witness who could identify him. After they searched his hotel room, they would likely have his DNA; and after they found the car he had stolen, they would have a sample of his very special blood. On top of all of that, he was two weeks late for his extraction and still hadn’t finished his assignment.
“All because of a girl,” Vladimir Pushkin mocked from the safety of a plastic couch that faced the office desk where Reisch brooded.
The garage had been the only stroke of luck he had had all day. He drove the BMW south, trying to get out of the city, but then thought better of using a stolen car on nearly empty streets, especially after attacking a police officer. It took him five minutes to find the closed auto repair shop, and even with his damaged mind and body, he was able to break into the empty office with ease. The garage door proved to be a bit trickier. The release mechanism was designed to be used by the uneducated, but all he saw were the constituent parts, not the mechanism as a whole. He randomly pulled and pushed at the fasteners and handles, and after ten frustrating minutes, he finally hit upon the correct combination. The door was weighted well, it rolled up easily, and the stolen BMW disappeared from the street.
“You know better than that,” Klaus answered sullenly.
“Why are you even here?” Pushkin asked.
Reisch finally looked up at his mentor. The Russian rarely asked banal questions, and he never asked metaphysical questions, his mind was stuck somewhere in between. “There’s no sense in having this discussion.”
“I think there is; I think it has a direct bearing on what you should do next. For reasons that you have failed to fully realize you accepted a mission you were never meant to perform. In fact, you didn’t just accept it; you demanded it as the price for your cooperation. It’s clear why; it was clear to the others— that’s why they refused to help you find her. They couldn’t have you distracted, and that is exactly what happened.”
Reisch knew that Pushkin was right; he had been distracted when he should have been focused on the simple task at hand. He just didn’t have the energy to admit it. Still, the conviction that he had to be the one to find Amanda remained strong, even after the debacle of the day. “I accepted the mission and have completed the most important part. The virus has been released.”
“In one small city. You were to spread it across the entire state, simultaneously; instead you created a single hot spot. A place for them to concentrate their resources, to cover it up. You were warned about this very thing, and more importantly, I trained you better than this.” A faint shade of red colored Pushkin’s nearly translucent face. He had died ten years earlier; twenty-five years after first saving Reisch’s life. He was an inconstant visitor now: a product of Reisch’s evolution.
“It will achieve the same result.”
“So you still trust what Avanti told you, despite the fact that you know that at this very minute he is betraying you to the Americans?”
“We all have our own agendas.” Reisch answered.
“Which leads us back to the question of why you are here. What is your agenda?”
Instead of answering, Reisch wondered for an untold time if Pushkin was simply an extension of his own consciousness, or something more. The Russian refused to discuss it, and if pushed would disappear for weeks. “I am compelled to be here,” Reisch finally said.
“Who or what compels you?”
“Do you really think that this is the time or the place for this discussion?”
Pushkin began to float just above the sofa. “I think that this is precisely the time, although I would prefer a more sanitary place.”
“You’ve never agreed or understood before; what makes you think now would be any different?”
“Because now this irrational need has put you at risk; I’m hoping that it is you who will understand.”
“It is only irrational to you,” Reisch answered angrily.
“Because the voices don’t talk to me?” Pushkin mocked.
If this had been anyone else, Reisch would have responded differently; instead he controlled the rage. “There is an underlying natural order to the universe; something in your current state you should be aware of; I am simply trying to live in harmony with it.”
“I never took you for a religious man.”
Pushkin kept pushing Reisch to the edge. “Religion is a human construct, and one of the very things I am trying to destroy,” he said through clenched teeth. “In time we will establish a civilization that has eliminated the need for religion.”
“I liked you better when you were a common sociopath.”
Reisch’s response was cut off by the sound of car wheels crunching through snow and ice. He sensed two minds, as well as two vehicles. A minute passed, and pair of keys and a note were pushed through a slot in the door. Reisch waited for the couple to leave and then collected the keys to a Mercedes SUV that needed an oil change and tire rotation. “This is what I was talking about,” Reisch said triumphantly to Pushkin. “This is the natural order,” he said holding up the keys.
“This is what I call luck,” the Russian answered while fading into the wallpaper.
Twenty minutes later, Reisch was driving west on Highway 24; the GPS told him he was sixteen miles away from a small town called Manitou Springs, where he would turn south. He still had one more task to perform, and then he would drop off everyone’s radar, including the men who had hired him. He would disappear into the jungles of Costa Rica while the mighty United States of America imploded, but hopefully not explosively. The virus he had spread these past six weeks was just a taste of things to come; just enough to get the worlds attention and have them close their collective doors to the U.S., before the real attack began.
No collateral damage, Reisch thought, at least not yet. He smiled, and then with a start quickly searched for the small black satchel that he had kept close for the last two months. It was still in the passenger seat where he had placed it earlier; inside was all he needed to restore balance. Over the course of the seven years that Pushkin had started appearing, Reisch had tried to explain the concept of universal balance to the Russian, but all he saw was religion in another guise. Even in his corporeal life he had limited vision, interested only in his comfort and the pursuit of pleasure. At the beginning, Reisch could relate to and reveled in such an existence, but over time as Pushkin became more extreme in his pursuits, Reisch became more repulsed by them. Neither of them chose to live within the constraints of society, but to Reisch’s thinking, that didn’t require you to deconstruct your personal identity. To be true to yourself, to follow the path that had been written in your soul was the only way order could be derived from chaos, the only way to peace and contentment. Reisch had followed that path from the moment of his inception in Honnecker’s dark dungeon. Along the way he had occasionally strayed, as he had while sampling Pushkin’s life of excess, or the time of instability after his infection; but in the end he found his way back to the straight path that lead to the universal constant of balance.