The Nameless Dead Read Free Page A

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 ina 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 conditionhad 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.

Two
    P eter 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