Allen Zadoff - Boy Nobody

It could mean I missed it, or it could mean they were let in by someone with access.

Someone like Sam.

The Presence is close now. I can sense him. I use the darkness and smoke to make my way through the basement hallway. I creep forward until I hear voices up ahead, arguing.

I peek into the room. A custodial office and changing area.

Men in shiny nylon jackets, all of them in masks, all of them speaking Hebrew.

The Presence is here.

He’s standing across the room wearing a mask, but I recognize his posture immediately.

He shouts at the other men, and they nod the way soldiers do when they’re taking orders.

Suddenly the men race out of the room. I slam my body back against the wall. They turn as they come out, running away from me without looking back.

Only the Presence is left inside.

I step into the room.

The Presence freezes. He stands still, watching me. The fabric around his mouth moves. Is it a smile?

“Your friends are gone,” I say.

“And you are alone,” he says in heavily accented English.

There’s a gun in his waistband. He reaches for it.

I’m too far away to jump him, and I don’t have a weapon of my own.

My best bet is to wait for the shot. If I move at the moment he pulls the trigger, it will reduce his effectiveness. How much will depend on how well trained he is.

He lifts his pistol, extending it toward me—

“Gideon,” I say.

He hesitates for a moment.

“You know me?” he says.

“I’ve seen your photo,” I say. “In Sam’s bedroom.”

The muscles in his jaw tense through the mask.

“And I’ve seen yours,” he says. “Sam sent it to me. So I could kill you.”

He pulls off his mask.

I see his face up close for the first time. Curly hair, dark eyes, and a beard.

I saw him in the Apple Store the first day, again in the subway the other night.

The Presence.

Now I understand why he looked familiar to me.

The Presence is Gideon.

He’s older now and he has a beard. That’s why I couldn’t immediately connect him to the soldier in the photos with Sam. Only his eyes are the same, cold and dead, the eyes of a soldier.

“You are the famous Ben,” he says.

He puts the pistol down on the table next to him.

“This will be for my men who you killed,” he says.

“Not for Sam?”

“Sam can take care of herself,” he says.

And he leaps at me.

He is shockingly fast, crossing the room in two large hops and attacking with vicious, well-aimed punches to my chest and head.

I knock the first few away, take the last in the chest. Hard.

He backs up, snorting, excited by the fight.

“I saw you in the Apple Store,” I say. “You’ve been after me from the very beginning.”

“I’ve been after you since Sam called me.”

“How did she know?”

“A strange man appears in her class days before a mission. That wouldn’t set off alarm bells for you?”

“It would. But I’m trained to see things like that.”

“So is Sam. By me.”

He shouts and comes fast with a series of kicks. Again, he’s on top of me before I can adjust. I manage to knock the first kick away with my forearm, but the second catches me on the side and sends me flying into the wall.

He fights emotionally, each attack a highly focused wave of anger and violence.

I’m not familiar with this style. Training and emotion tend to cancel each other out. I’ve fought disciplined men, their moves calculated and deadly. I’ve fought emotional ones who rush in and try to overwhelm.

I know how to handle both kinds.

But this is something else.

I need to keep him talking, distract him long enough to get my bearings.

“You recruited Sam in Israel after her mother’s death,” I say.

“It was not so difficult. A girl whose mother was killed in a bombing attack. A girl as emotional as Sam. And so very useful because of her father.”

Without warning he comes again. He rushes directly toward me, jinking away at the last second, running halfway up the wall and using it to propel him sideways in a flying kick that sends me crashing through a table.

“She thinks you love her,” I say.

“I do love her,” he says.

I turn just in time to see him swinging a table leg down at my head like a club.

Boom. He misses by an inch.

“You used her,” I say.

Boom. I jerk at the last second and he misses again.

“And what did you do to her?” he says.

Boom. A third time.

I’ve had enough. I torque backward, spring off my hands, and kick him in the chest with both legs. He goes flying into a metal locker.

“So you do know how to fight,” he says.

We rush each other, meeting in the center of the room. I attack high and low at the same time, testing for weaknesses in his defense. No matter how well trained, most people will favor one side or another, one zone more than the next. If I can find his weak point—

A hand closes around my neck.

Gideon. He’s somehow reached through my attack and grasped me by the throat.

“You’re thinking when you should be fighting,” he says. “That is a problem.”

“I don’t need a lesson from you.”

I clench the muscles in my neck, fighting the pincer grip.

“A final lesson,” he says.

The grip tightens, cutting off the blood flow to my brain.

I have seconds before losing consciousness—

“Gideon!” Sam shouts.

His grip loosens for a millisecond, and I thrash out at him, an open palm to the chin followed by an elbow that connects to his nose with an ugly crunch. He goes sprawling across the room, nearly crashing into Sam.

Sam.

In the doorway now. Watching.

“Samara, get out of here,” Gideon says.

He says her name with a Hebrew pronunciation.

“What are you going to do, Gideon?” she says.

He steps toward me, but Sam stops him with a hand on his chest.

“Tell me,” she says.

His body softens. I see the intimacy in the gesture between them.

I say, “Does she know that you’re going to kill her father?”

“What?” Sam says.

“Don’t listen to him,” Gideon says. “Your father is not our objective.”

The prime minister. He’s the target.

Sam didn’t know this, which means she didn’t know about tonight. Not the details, at least. But she knew what she was doing when she put the plans on the blog.

And when she gave them my photo.

“I thought you were Israeli,” I say.

“Proudly,” he says.

“Why are you attacking your own man?”

“I’m following instructions,” he says. “Just as I believe you are.”

“Whose instructions?”

“A group within a group within a group. You know how these things work.” He looks at Sam. “You told me he was smart,” Gideon says.

Sam stares at the ground.

“But your men are wearing masks and speaking Arabic,” I say.

“That’s the brilliance of it. Somewhere in Queens, the police are kicking down a doorway right now, finding evidence of a homegrown terror cell. They are the ones who are responsible for tonight.”

“That’s why you’re playing Halloween down here. You want it to look like terrorism.”

“You have to admit it’s a nice twist,” he says.

He turns to Sam. He puts a hand on her cheek.

“You do not need to be here now,” he says. “This man is not your friend. He was sent to hurt you.”

She looks at me.

“Is that true, Ben?”

Is it true?

Yes. But I deviated from the plan.

I can’t explain that to her now, so I say nothing at all.

“You see?” Gideon says.