Marked Man II - 02 Read Free

as they lie asleep. He had to face southwest so as to fight off this threat if he saw it coming.
     
    Methamphetamine withdrawal can manifest such hallucinations. Clemons knew this, but he didn’t know of any recovering addicts that continued to believe such crap even long after the meth was flushed from their system. Uri Grigoriyevich was the exception to every rule. The fly in every jar of ointment.
     
    The feds shuttled him to hotels around the east coast and the Midwest, staying no longer than three nights in any particular location. In the past the Russians had proved disturbingly proficient at having witnesses killed even in police custody so Agent Clemons took no chances. When they travelled Uri had to be bound and quartered in the back of a windowless van. He was never allowed to leave the hotel rooms, under any circumstances. Uri begged to use the spa, or swim in the pool, or most of all, check his e-mails but Clemons never relented.
     
    The matter of the e-mails was a distraction that had tested Clemons’ patience farther than he ever could have thought it would. Uri positively hounded the agents with him whenever he saw a computer in the lobby at check-in.
     
    “Just zis once? I must answer to my grandmozer zat I am okay.”
     
    “No.”
     
    “You are bully man! BIG bully! Cannot you let zis man e-mail his grandmozer even once.”
     
    Agent Clemons knew that Uri had no grandmother to keep in touch with. As far as he could tell the only messages Uri had ever received were from sadist and masochist porn sites. His patience was exhausted with the constant requests.
     
    “If you ask again Uri I’m going to drop you off in front of Shirokov’s front door and leave you there.”
     
    This threat usually worked to quiet him. While Uri Grigoriyevich was frightened of the desert, three o’clock in the morning, the state of Michigan, pomegranates, and an assortment of other nonsensical phobias, nothing got him to shut up faster than the sound of Shirokov’s name.
     
    Lately Uri had been telling the rotating cadre of federal agents that he was going to die. As spring transformed to summer it became an all-consuming terror. Agent Clemons was beginning to wonder just how well Uri could possibly stand trial when he was consumed by that level of fear.
     
    If Uri heard a faucet dripping he went into a frenzy until the drip was put to a stop. He was convinced that the United States government was dispersing biochemical agents through the water supply in a sadistic experiment on its citizens. If they were travelling Uri always checked the skies for trails left by airliners passing overhead. Uri called them chemtrails, and claimed that these too contained chemical agents. Every single airplane flying over U.S. airspace was party to a massive criminal conspiracy. All that was needed to create an extinction-level event was to introduce one extra compound into the toxic mix.
     
    Listening to Uri’s theories sometimes made Agent Clemons wonder why he had ever become a federal agent in the first place. Other times he thought about writing a memoir once he retired so he could include all of the absurd stories he’d been subjected too. In his psychological profile of Uri Grigoriyevich, Clemons classified him as a possible paranoid schizophrenic and an ideal example of the criminal thought process.
     
    Clemons had his own theory: that brain science would one day determine not only who would become criminals, but also could predict where, when, and who they would strike.
     
    Uri was the missing link in abnormal psychology; an absolute prodigy of an example of what happens when you take two parts poverty, one part bad parenting, and a dash of traumatic head injuries in childhood. Clemons was past trying to dissuade Uri from his paranoid ramblings.
                 
    “Ok you’re right. You’re probably going to die tonight. But what do you want to eat for breakfast in the morning? I’ll bring it with me in