“Michael, did I catch you at work?” Patton kept his voice light. He had always been on good terms with his brotherin-law, but their relationship had subtly and understandably changed after Connie’s death.
“Rodney! How the hell are you? Man, I haven’t heard from you in a couple of months. So what’s new?” Michael Weigel sounded genuinely happy to hear from Patton.
“You may have heard that we’re having a bit of a problem up here, and I was wondering if I could bounce a name off you?” He just didn’t have the heart for small talk.
“Sure. Is this an official request, or more of a discreet inquiry?”
“Let me tell you what I know, and you tell me what would be best for you.” Patton described the events at the Van Ders’ and then later at the hotel. “In both cases, this tall, dark man is somehow central. Now, this is where things get a little strange. Both witnesses say that this tall guy never actually touched either victim, and my officer, the one who survived, insists that this guy — now don’t laugh — reached into his head and tried to kill him by squeezing his brain.” Patton paused to let the absurdity sink in.
“Okay, that is strange. Sounds like your officer had some head trauma that the witness missed.” Michael’s tone was suddenly all business.
“That’s what I thought as well, but I checked with the hospital before I got back here, and there is no sign of one. Yaeger, that’s my officer, said he heard a name in his head, Klaus Reisch, and he was fairly certain that this guy was a German. He was also ranting about some woman named Amanda hurting Reisch. I know that this is probably a wild-goose chase, but I’ll be honest with you, Michael. . Things are not going well here, and chasing wild geese is about all I’ve got left.”
Michael didn’t respond for several seconds. “Klaus Reisch, did I hear you correctly?” he finally said, but all familiarity and ease was gone from his voice.
“Yes, that’s what he said. Klaus Reisch.” Patton had picked up on the change in his brotherin-law’s manner.
“This is strange, Rodney; very, very strange. There are probably fewer than twenty people in the whole agency who know that name, and that he is a German. What are the odds that your brotherin-law just happened to be one of them?” His voice was low and thoughtful.
“So this guy really does exist?” Patton said with surprise. With the way this day had been going, the only thing that should have surprised him was that he could still be surprised.
“Some of us, most of us think so. He’s sort of the Carlos the Jackal of our generation. He’s so good, no one is really sure that he exists. We stopped hearing about him a few years back, and some of us thought that he had retired.”
“This can’t be the same guy. Our man was sloppy and amateurish,” Patton said, feeling better that he wasn’t chasing some international criminal legend. “Still, there has to be a connection.”
“Maybe.” Michael paused. “Rodney, I would like you to make a formal inquiry about these events, and I think it would be appropriate to include Mr. Reisch by name. I’m not at liberty to discuss this matter any further, but I can tell you that very recently this gentleman’s name has come up in conversations of people far above my pay grade.”
“This doesn’t sound too good,” Patton said, the weight of this recent development adding to the burden he was already carrying.
“Let me give you some advice. Stay away from this one. About fifteen years ago, we put together a task force to track this son of a bitch. He grew up working for the Soviets, and even those ruthless bastards had to keep him on the shortest possible leash. But after the wall fell, he began to freelance. Rumor has it that he even went after a couple of his Russian handlers. They’re scared shitless of this guy. One of the old KGB boys told me that he goes to bed every night worried that he’s going to wake up with Reisch standing over him.”
“Any physical description?” Patton knew what was coming: tall, thin, and dark.
“Tall, really tall. Six and a half feet, maybe, but apparently he’s rail thin, maybe a hundred eighty pounds. Don’t hold me to that — this guy is like a ghost. Even with the Russians’ help, we could never find anyone who actually had seen him in the flesh.”
Chapter 23
Oliver took a full minute to respond. “How did you survive?”
Amanda looked down and unbuttoned the top three buttons of her blouse, then slipped the sleeve over her shoulder. The skin was smooth. “I shouldn’t have, and I should also have a scar.” She pulled her sleeve back into place and rebuttoned her blouse. “I was less than ten feet away when he shot me. Ted was probably twenty feet away, and the bullet passed right through him. He had an exit wound as big as a grapefruit. I ended up with a bruise and a sore shoulder.”
“How is that possible?”
“It took me a couple years to figure it out.” She reached down and found her purse. After rummaging through it for a moment, she extracted a photograph and passed it over to Oliver. “This was taken a couple of months after I came home, just before I went to Washington.”
Oliver studied the photo while Amanda returned to her purse and found a second picture. Greg Flynn in a bathing suit, and standing behind a sand castle was two other figures, but their faces were obscured by a starburst of color. “All right, I see Greg, and I think that’s Lisa standing next to him, but the third person—”
“Is me.”
“Did this get wet?” Oliver asked.
“No.” She pushed the second photo towards him. “What do you see in this one?”
“You,” Oliver said. A smiling Amanda stared back at him from the photo in perfect clarity. Her hair was much longer, and her face was well tanned. “I don’t get it.”
“The first photo is on regular film — the old fashioned kind. The second is a digital picture that responds only to visible light.” She gathered the two pictures and looked back up at him. “All living beings emit a tiny electrical field that some photographic films can detect. Remember back in high school science class when you put your hand on a cathode ray tube and sparks seemed to fly from your fingers? This is the same thing. Somehow this infection increases the strength of that field.”
“To the point where it can deflect bullets?” Oliver was openly skeptical.
“It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I was shot. He didn’t miss. I remember throwing my hands up just before he fired, so I did have an instant to react.”
Oliver took another full minute to respond. “So, in that instant this electrical field slowed down the bullet,” he said in a controlled voice that betrayed the difficulty he was having in grasping the concept.
Amanda wasn’t surprised by his attitude. “I know it’s hard to believe, but there’s no other explanation for how I survived — or for this.” She tossed a small object on his desk, and it came down with a muted thud.
Oliver examined the flattened metal object. It was about the size of a half dollar, gray, and dense. One side was completely smooth, and the other was pitted and irregular.
“I had Greg check that. It once was a bullet. I found it at the feet of the man I killed.”
Oliver rubbed the bullet nervously. The metal had the same polished feel as his crucifix, and his thumb almost fit into a well-worn groove. He realized that she had come to believe in this bullet as much as he believed in the crucifix. “What happened after you came home — from Washington, I mean?”
“It took them about six months to piece it all together. Apparently, there were enough witnesses to get a fairly accurate description of me, and then I guess it was just a matter of cross-checking airline records and hotel records. Don’t ever underestimate the FBI when they really want something. After they finally had my name, all the pieces seemed to come together for them. They linked what happened in Honduras with the Chinese, and a conspiracy was born.