Shadow

I knew one thing for sure: this guy wasn't going to give me a straight answer about anything. Everybody I've run into in the past week has been some kind of expert in half-answers and tricky question-dodging.

Thomas Pratt, as he called himself, was sitting across from me at an old, wooden table in an old, cozy cafe in old, historic Vienna. As my brain rushed to put together the few pieces of information I had at the moment, I couldn't presently back-track my actions to remember how I'd gotten here.

He knew my name, that was enough to freak me out. Either he actually knew who I was, or he got my name from my hotel, which means that time I was sure I wasn't being followed, I was. Interpol? What do they do? Oversight and cross-communications between African and European police organizations. Drug enforcement, probably anti-terrorism stuff, bank fraud. Oh great, bank fraud! The whole thing at the bank, with the newspaper ad for magical untraceable Austrian bank accounts was all a setup -- a sting. Wait for silly Americans to come wondering in asking for bank accounts practically invented for money laundering, then tell him the only way to do so is illegally.

Wait, that doesn't make sense. For one thing, that's entrapment. Besides that, it still doesn't make sense.

And how long have I been sitting here in confused silence?

"You're trying to think of how you might know me?" Pratt finally said. I nodded, then glanced around the place; there were three other occupied tables and three people behind the counter.
"Don't worry," he continued, "you probably don't."
"So what is this?" I asked, choosing my words carefully.
"This," he said with that stupid coy grin, "is the justification of the last two years of my career."

I didn't say anything. He opened his leather jacket and pulled a thick file folder from inside and set it down in front of him with a slight dramatic slam. He opened the top cover gently, flipped through a few pages I couldn't see, then pulled out a 8"x10" photograph and slid it over to me. I bent over to look at it, it was a portrait of a man in a strong navy-blue suit. Old, maybe fifties with silver hair and a powerful brow. He didn't look American. Pratt watched my face carefully as I looked at the photograph.

"Who's this?" I asked.
"You don't know?"
I looked down at the picture again, then shook my head.
"That is Jens Nesimi, an Austrian political figurehead and former military commander. You're sure you've never seen him?"
"If he was ever in a US newspaper or on the news, I may have seen his face before, but I don't recognize him at all. I don't usually follow Austrian politics."
"Don't usually?" he asked.
"Don't ever," this was beginning to sound like an interrogation; where the investigators will try to use your words against you. I was beginning to become uncomfortable.

Pratt slid the photo back onto the stack of documents and flipped forward a few pages, producing another photograph (this one smaller) and sliding it over. The shot was less formal. It was of an ornate bedroom shot from eye-level. A large, king sized bed was center frame, draped in lush-looking green sheets and a thick comforter, slightly disrupted by a man's body hanging awkwardly off the edge of the mattress. The body was dressed in blue pajamas, the face pressed against the wood floor, its torso hanging over the edge, and the legs were under the sheets. It looked as if the man was trying to slide onto the floor but his legs were tangled by tightly tucked sheets. I recognized the photo now as a crime scene photograph. The careless use of over-powered flash gave it away.

When I looked up from the photo, Pratt slid another over. It was the same room, the same man, but taken from another angle to show the man's face. It was the guy from the first photo, Nesimi. He was certainly dead, with a pale look of hopeless consternation on the part of his face that wasn't pressed against the floor. I frowned slightly. This was probably the first real dead person I'd seen outside of a casket.

"What's this about?" I asked, pushing both pictures away.
"Nesimi died in his home two years ago, apparently in his sleep, apparently he had a heart attack, tried to get up, but died almost instantly while his wife lay beside him. Because of the high profile, I was brought on by the local police to assist in the investigation."
"Investigation? I thought it was a heart attack," I said, forgoing the utter irrelevancy of any of this to me.
"That's how it seemed, but there were things that didn't match. He was a military man, in perfect health, except for HIV."

"He had AIDS?" this went from feeling like an interrogation to feeling like gossip.
"No, not AIDS, just HIV," Pratt looked annoyed that I didn't know the distinction. "He kept it a secret, fearing that if word got out his reputation would be destroyed. The official record is that there was some blood cross-contamination during his military career, but who knows, eh? The point of all that is, he was seeing a private physician in secret every month. After Nesimi turned 40, the doctor began running blood tests and heart EKG tests every month because of the risk of heart disease. Nobody knew about this doctor or his exams except for Nesimi and his wife. The thing that made people question the heart attack theory is that Nesimi had been to his doctor that very same day, given a clean bill of health."
"Even his heart?" I asked.
"Especially his heart. According to this doctor, Nesimi was so paranoid about having heart problems that he made the doctor run a full workup every month. The type of tests that aren't even necessary every year."
"So the doctor said his heart was fine just a few hours before he had a heart attack. Could the doctor have just been faking the test results since he thought they were pointless?" this really was beginning to sound like gossip.

"I thought of that, but I checked it out. No malpractice. Though, it wasn't really likely to begin with. The reason I was brought onto the investigation was that the security system at Nesimi's home had an abnormality. He lived in a large estate inside the city with fences, security cameras, door alarms, motion sensors, all the good stuff. When the local police happened to take a look at the camera footage, they found that the cameras had all gone down for 3 minutes, 2 minutes before the coroner estimated Nesimi's death. They checked the system logs, and the gate, door, and motion alarms had all shut down at the same time too."
"So..."
"So, someone may have disabled the alarms, snuck in, and somehow poisoned Nesimi with something that mimics a heart attack."
"In 3 minutes?"
"Sure."
"And what does this have to do with me?" I was getting a bit antsy. The coffee and juice had gone through me and I needed to find and use the bathroom.
"I'm getting to that," Pratt said. He was still leaning back, calm and comfortable.
He continued, "When I was brought on, the first thing I did was have a second autopsy done. This is how they found the abacavir in his system, which is what lead me to the doctor and the fact that he'd had all the heart tests that very day, confirming my suspicion."
This was getting interesting, like some police/medical drama. "The autopsy didn't show any signs of poisoning?" I asked.
"Well, we first thought the HIV treatments were the poison, but when we found out they were prescribed, we had to do another autopsy."
"A third?"
"Yes. There was nothing in his stomach or intestines that looked like a poison, so it must have been an injection. There were no visible needle marks on the skin, so I had the body flayed to look for any fine needle injection marks--"
"Wait, flayed?"
"Yes. The skin is removed from the muscle tissue over the whole body. Skin is elastic and will hide a needle mark if the needle is thin enough and injected into a muscle, not a vein, but the muscle tissue itself is disrupted by the injection, so the only way to find an injection point is to look at the muscle, not the skin."
"That is very gross."
"Nesimi's family agreed. They'd already asked for no autopsies after the first, so I'd done two more against their wishes. They had the last one stopped when they heard about it. They'd wanted an open-casket funeral, which would be impossible with the skin removed from the body."

I nodded, feeling slightly sick.

"But they found it anyway, the needle point. In the neck, just above the shoulder. He'd been injected with something that didn't show up in the blood work. This meant whatever it was had crossed the blood-brain barrier, and the examiner told me the only way to find the poison would be to wring out the cranial fluid or the fluid inside the eyeballs."

Now I was feeling very sick.

"But we couldn't proceed, because the family had the body removed and buried. I knew the man had been murdered, injected with something that caused or mimicked a heart attack, at night while the security system was disabled. It was like a shadow assassin, the thought plagued me for weeks. I'd gone through all of Nesimi's contacts, friends, enemies, employees, and family members, and found nothing. There were no leads, and the case was closed. The family was furious at me for letting word get out about his HIV, and then having his body cut up. My career was put on hold, promotions lost, my life pretty-much ruined by this Shadow. I had to redeem myself, and answer this riddle that was driving me mad. I finally began recalling all security camera footage from any home or business within three blocks of Nesimi's home, but found nothing.

"Nothing, except one frame from the street security camera of a bank across the road from Nesimi's estate. It was a reflection off of the windshield of a car parked on the street outside the gate at Nesimi's home," Pratt trailed off and pulled another photo from the folder. It was an 8"x10" again, but flimsy as if printed on a desktop printer.

The shot was dark, and obviously had been digitally enlarged. I could see a road, and a row of cars parked against it. Beyond the cars was a tall iron-looking gate with brick columns every 10-or-so feet. At the far right of the frame, on the windshield of the car closest to the camera, was a slight reflection provided by a street lamp. The reflection was of somebody leaning against one of the brick columns somewhere outside the frame. The person was wearing black, as far as I could tell, and looking to the side, giving a slight profile of the face in the reflection. I brought the photo closer to my eyes and squinted to look at the face. It was a male, but he looked young and the reflection distorted everything. I shook my head.

Pratt handed me another flimsy photo, an enlargement of a single quadrant of the previous. The photo showed just the section of the car windshield with the reflection. I could see the guy leaning against the column, could now see that he was looking down at a wrist watch, and could clearer see the face.
It was my face.

Well, it sort of looked like my face. It was blurry, digitally enlarged, warped by the reflection, and very dark, but it looked a lot like me two years ago. It was silly, and preposterous, but still shocked me. My eyes widened and my heart picked up its pace.

"That photo was the only lead I'd developed after a 2 month investigation. A blurry reflection of a teenager's face. When I showed it to superiors and the detectives at the police department, they laughed at me. A shot of a teenager outside a man's house in the middle of the night hardly proved anything. They said it could be anybody, just some neighborhood kid walking around. But I knew it was the Shadow. I'd interviewed everybody who lived or worked within walking distance from the estate. And that posture, leaning against the gate and looking at a watch. That shot was taken about thirty seconds before the house's security system shut down. He's waiting for something, for word that the system was offline or waiting for whatever he'd done to disable it to be activated.

"That photograph haunted me. I put it up on my office wall, then on the side of my desk after I'd been demoted. I looked at it every day, knowing whoever that was had destroyed by career; but I respected him. He'd performed an almost untraceable hit. I've dealt with many assassinations, but never one so clean. Everybody I know and work with knows about that picture, they see it every time they come to my desk, know what it means to me. So when Markus, a former partner of mine happened to see you walking from that bank today, he thought he'd give me a call," he gestured to the guy he was with, the man I'd seen at the bank.

"I checked the bank, and called the hotel that Markus had followed you to. Christopher Baker. An American. I knew the Shadow had to be a foreigner, all the good assassins come from Russia or the Americas. Then I saw you for myself when you came out of the hotel, saw your face, I knew it was you. But how could I rationalize someone your age, who would have been fifteen at the time, being such a skilled killer? I can't, but here you are buying a Sparbuch account, probably to hold funds for another hit. Why else would someone like you need one?"

Ok, this guy was loopy in the head. "You think I killed some politician guy? That's insane."
He nodded. "I know it's insane, and this is why it works so well. I don't know how I'll prove it, but I will. I don't know how someone your age can do what you do, but you do it."

This was all too unbelievable. I shook my head and chuckled, I thought that I'd been caught for my visit with Comstock this morning, or worse, but this crazy guy just thinks I look like a kid who was outside someone's house two years ago the night someone died? You can't make this stuff up.

"Are you kidding me? There's billions of kids on the planet, yet you know that 'shadow' of yours is me because I kind of look like a sideways reflection taken off a camera in the dark two years ago? Do you go around to all the high schools in the country and interrogate any brown-haired kid with that nose and subtle cheekbones?"

Pratt slid the two photos back into the folder and closed it, folded his hands, and finally leaned into the table. "Do not mistake me for crazed idiot, Chris, I know that face. I know your face. You come from America, you pay for hotel rooms and plane tickets with your own money, you buy untraceable bank accounts used throughout history to launder money and to collect payment for illegal jobs. You're a minor yet you're visiting Europe by yourself on a three-day trip yet you've done no sightseeing as I can tell. I wouldn't make a mistake like this."

I sighed, feeling like I was going to be kidnapped by a lunatic obsessed with teenage boys. "You've got nothing to go on, though," I said, "they said that the photo of that kid wasn't enough to continue the case, so just finding someone who looks like him isn't going to change anything."
"True, but if I suspect you of terrorism I can hold you for at least 24 hours without charges. That will give me time enough to run your fingerprints and photograph through every Interpol database, put a hold on your passport, or track down your relatives or employers. It might even keep you from performing another of your miraculous hits if that's what you're here to do."

Suddenly this had all lost its gleeful air of ridiculousness.

Pratt stood up, motioning his friend Markus to come over. "As we suspect you of terrorist activities," Pratt began, "we're taking you into custody for questioning and examination." He pulled a set of silver handcuffs from his belt, and Markus stepped over and pulled me up by my arm.

All this, and I still really had to pee.