Paul Johnson: The nameless dead

Karen’s eyes were wet. ‘It isn’t fair. He deserves better.’

I felt my son kick against the palm of my hand. ‘Of course he does,’ I said softly. ‘Especially since his names are going to be Mick and Keith.’

That earned me an elbow in the gut.

‘I told you, Matt,’ Karen said, a smile playing on her lips. ‘No wrinkled Rolling Stones’ names. It’s Algernon or nothing.’

I laughed and brought my mouth close to her bulge. ‘Hey, Nothing!’ I called. ‘Stop kicking your mum!’

Her elbow made contact again before I could get away.

Later on, I went to the FBI’s version of Frankenstein’s laboratory. It smelled as bad as usual: of dubious chemical compounds, half-finished plates of food from the canteen, and apprehension, though I may have been responsible for the last.

‘Good afternoon, Mr. Wells.’

I nodded to the elderly scientist. Dr. Rivers wasn’t a bad type, but he was over-keen on formality. Despite the fact that I’d told him weeks ago to use my first name, he stuck to my surname. Maybe he thought that would reinforce my comprehension of what I really was-a British crime novelist who had got involved with more killers than was good for his health, rather than the mindless pawn of Nazi conspirators.

‘Today we will try some new triggers that the computer has thrown up, if you don’t mind.’ Rivers led me to the secure room. It had armored glass windows on all sides and the only furniture was a chair bolted to the middle of the floor. At least they weren’t chaining me to a bed anymore-that had got very tedious. Now I was free to walk around in the room.

I sat and watched as electrodes were attached to my head and body. The wires ran to a transmitter that was hooked onto the pocket of my orange jumpsuit. Then the glass door closed behind the doctor and his technician, bolts shooting into their sockets with a loud thunk. My legs twitched as tedium gripped me. Things only got interesting when we came across a trigger, but that hadn’t happened for a couple of weeks. I was still on edge-the experience was weirder than smoking camel dung.

‘Ready, Mr. Wells?’ Dr. Rivers’s voice came through a speaker above the door. He had taken up his usual position behind a bank of screens.

I raised a hand.

‘Matthew Wells, session number twenty-seven, December fifth, 1612 hours,’ the scientist said for the recording. He paused, and then started reading out the list of words slowly.

‘Faden.’ He paused again, waiting to see if I meta-morphosed into a psycho killer. Nothing.

‘Eggenfelden.’ Ditto.

‘Kinski.’ Zilch.

And so the list went on. I sometimes tried to guess what the unfamiliar words meant, but I’d never studied German so I remained generally clueless. It was often hard even to discern which ones were proper names.

‘Alexanderplatz.’

That was easier. I had the impression there had been some important Nazi offices in the Berlin square of that name. Since I remained in control of myself, the Rothmanns obviously hadn’t deemed it worthy of use.

My mind began to drift. Rivers didn’t protest when that happened; in fact, he’d told me at the start of the process that it was probably better if I didn’t concentrate on what was said. So I let my thoughts wander. Inevitably I found myself thinking about Karen. She was right. We might well be kept in the camp indefinitely; it might become our personal Guantanamo Bay, Illinois-style-we’d only been told which state we were in after a week had elapsed. There had been no sign of the therapy ending. For prisoners, we were comfortable enough. We had a fairly decent apartment and wholesome food provided but were under constant surveillance, with cameras and microphones in every room. The tracking cuff had only recently been taken off Karen’s swollen ankle. Given her condition, she was hardly going to make a dash for freedom-not that the high, razor-wired fences could be scaled, even by someone as fit and long-legged as Quincy Jerome.

There was only one thing to be said for our enforced stay. It meant that the woman who had sworn to kill me couldn’t get to us. Sara Robbins, my former lover, had turned out to be the sister of a ruthless serial executioner who called himself the White Devil. He tried to frame me for his crimes, and, after his death, Sara took up the baton, murdering one of my closest friends and nearly doing in my ex-wife Caro and our daughter Lucy. Sara had made herself into an even more lethal executioner than her brother and it wasn’t long after the attempt on the President’s life that she’d sent me a message-helpfully passed on by the Feds, who were monitoring my email-saying that she was looking forward to catching up with me.

‘Bismarck,’ said Rivers.

‘Too obvious,’ I said, shaking my head.

The doctor raised his hands, a look of irritation on his thin face. ‘Please don’t interrupt, Mr. Wells,’ he said, with a cough. ‘Or make smart comments. Krankenhaus.’

I was tempted to recommend that he get his throat looked at in a krankenhaus. The word had come up in a pub quiz years ago and I had guessed it meant ‘lunatic asylum’ rather than ‘hospital.’ That really would have been too suggestive, considering the Rothmann’s father had worked at the Auschwitz krankenhaus. I was so busy damping down a sudden flare of anger about what the Nazi bastards had done to millions of innocent people, let alone Karen and me, that the next word took me by complete surprise.

‘Fontane.’

Immediately I felt the hairs rise all over my body.

The conscious part of me seemed to disconnect and rise upward like a spirit. I watched from above as my corporeal self leapt to its feet and started roaring incomprehensibly. Running to the door, trying to break out, I felt no pain as my shoulder repeatedly crashed into the glass.

Somewhere in the distance a voice was speaking, telling me to breathe deeply and calm myself, reminding me to use the calming techniques I had been taught. With concentration, they had some effect. Eventually I returned to my body, which stopped raging and stepped back from the door. I found myself confused and gasping for breath. I kept hearing words I couldn’t understand, words barked out in a harsh voice, and I looked around desperately for a way out. I knew the idea behind these triggers was to provoke different reactions. Some drove subjects to acts of extreme violence at specific targets, others to covert intelligence gathering, or communication with superiors via phone numbers or email addresses previously inaccessible to their memory. This had been one of the violent reactions, but I didn’t have any target in mind. I also knew what would happen next. When Dr. Rivers was satisfied that my condition had stabilized, there would be a puff of gas from a pipe in the ceiling and I would be rendered unconscious.

Before the darkness took me, I found myself wondering who or what ‘Fontane’ was.

Peter Sebastian, Director of the FBI’s violent crime unit, was not a happy man. In the last week his hitherto stellar career (apart from the jolt at Washington National Cathedral) was beginning to turn to excrement.

First, there had been the murder in Manhattan: civil rights lawyer Laurie Simpson found decapitated in her apartment, her innards piled on a dresser above which a large red swastika had been sprayed. Her head had been carefully positioned upside down in the toilet bowl. Examination of the wounds suggested that a large, but by no means unusual, knife, probably manufactured for the hunting market, had been used, while the paint was a very common brand. The CSIs had discovered minimal signs of a forced entry-the killer had picked two complex but fairly standard locks, but there were no foot-or fingerprints and no significant fibers or other traces. NYPD detectives were following up on Ms. Simpson’s professional activities-the legal practice in Harlem had been vandalized by far-right extremists more than once, and she had written some strongly worded antifascist pamphlets when she was younger. The fact that her dead black lover’s face had been at the center of the swastika seemed to point indisputably to racist motivations.