The Shadow Master

By David Chacko

TIME. An archeologist found dead in his hotel room suddenly ran out of it. His brother Klement, a former intelligence agent, suspects his death was as unnatural as the things he did in a race against it. Klement joins the chase for an invaluable book that is a monument to it.

A beautiful art dealer, a mass killer, and an invisible man all rock around this clock.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Foremost Press
• Release date: Feb 12, 2010
• ISBN: 9781936154210

David Chacko

A lot of what a writer does at the desk is the result of research being plugged into what happened every day of his life up to that point. Where he's born doesn't mean a lot except that's part of what he brings to the work. So let's say I was born in a small town in Western Pennsylvania where the coal mines closed thirty years before, then let's say that I found my way to New York and Ohio and New England and Florida and Istanbul with lot of stops along the way. I don't remember much about most of those places except that I was there in all of them and I was thinking. One of the things I was thinking about, because I'm always thinking about it, is the way people and governments lie to themselves and others. Those two thing--the inside and the outside of the truth--might be the same thing, really. That place of seeming contradictions is where I live. And that's where every last bit of The Satan Machine comes from. The lies piled up around the attempted assassination of the pope like few events in the history of man. Most of it had to do with geopolitics, especially those strange days when the world was divided into two competing blocs that were both sure they were right in trying to dominate. So an event that was put through the gigantic meat grinder was one that would be mangled nearly forever. That's what I've been thinking about--the hamburger, so to speak. The results will be told in several blog entries from my website, so you might want to mosey over to www.davidchacko.com. I can guarantee you a good time.

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THE SHADOW MASTER

David Chacko

Published by Foremost Press at Smashwords

Copyright © 2000 David Chacko

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For Betul

The body makes use of many tools; but

the body and its parts are used by the soul,

and the soul in its turn is a tool of God.

~ ~ ~ Plutarch

THE HOURS

Prague

December 31, 2000

Will you kill him?

Klement looked at Ruzena over the table where the Hours lay like the most barbaric work of art cast by the hand of man. He forced his eyes from the table to the only moving object in the room. She had put the baby in a kind of grappling harness that hung from the doorframe to a point just above the carpet. He bounced merrily in thin air, his feet touching the ground only when he worked the elastics in the device very hard. It was like watching an astronaut make his way in zero gravity high above the earth. And perhaps that was what she was preparing the child for. A future in space.

Klement asked himself what he had prepared for in the last ten years. At times, it seemed that his mind had not moved at all. He had seen his country split in two—but peacefully. He had seen the world move toward one pole as if it did not know that the universe required a twain. He had seen himself prosper through no doing of his own. When he needed money, it came like a change in weather. He sometimes felt that was because he had done nothing with his part of the manuscript until now. He had kept it in isolation, in a state of non-being, for all that time.

Klement looked at the cover of the Hours again. A figure of a golden cup—a chalice—lurked through the filth of the ages. Bound in a filigree of silver, with three slots above that were gapingly empty, it looked like history in a cage. The slots were ready to accept the coins—the hosts. When he put them in place, all that was dark would become suddenly incandescent, or as suddenly expire. The difference between this strange thing and the flow of human consciousness was that the manuscript looked onto the future and became what it saw. That was the legend.

Klement was sorry he had told Ruzena the story of the Hours. Why had he done it? What she had kept for him unknowingly for the last ten years could have been taken without an explanation. She had no idea of its worth.

But she had asked the right question. Yes, Klement had a pistol in the holster that rimmed his left shoulder and forced him to sit awkwardly in the chair. He had made all the arrangements for the meeting in the meticulous way that he had learned when the Cold War was so frigid to the touch it always left skin behind. He would not be surprised—except by himself.

But really, the question was this: Was he obliged to end the life of the man who had been responsible for his brother’s death? Klement could not say that this man had caused his brother’s death, but the responsibility had been his. The people and events he had set in motion made the very worst happen. It all had to do with the manuscript that Klement now lifted from the table.

Carefully, he set it inside the briefcase. He set the detonator to activate with a fifteen-second delay. A radio-control device implanted in the skin between his thumb and forefinger was the trigger. The Hours, and all things within a prescribed area, could be destroyed with a touch. Possibly, he could destroy the man who wanted it so badly. Or he could simply walk away.

I don’t want to be coy, Ruzena. I’d tell you what I was going to do if I knew.

She gave her Madonna smile—a new thing—then rose and took three steps that brought her to the front of the vestibule. With practiced movements, she undid the snaps that held the elaborate harness in place. And the child was in her arms.

There’s always new life, Klement. She shifted the boy into the crook of her arm. What do they know of the things we know? What can they not unlearn?

Time, thought Klement. That cannot be unlearned. At midnight, the year would turn. 2001 was the correct date for the millennium. That was the hour, calculated from an ancient miscalculation, that would bring on the truth, which was the resurrection or the beast.

The killer.

What had begun in death should end that way. Klement had that feeling, like a worm in his blood, but he had not completely trusted his emotions since the day his brother died. That was when the strangeness—the miracles and the abominations—had begun.

PART ONE:

LOOTERS

THE THIRD WORLD

The Horn of Africa

May, 1990

Klement did not relax until the aircraft cleared the landmass and began to make ground on its shadow in the sea. How hot was it there on the surface? When would they escape the range of shoulder-mounted missiles? At what point had Moses, or God, parted the waters?

Klement had left behind friends in Africa who would either leave the place or die. Their disposition on this earth depended on one thing: at what point they could arrange to separate themselves from the cause. They had looked at him with longing, and some with accusation, when he gave them goodbye.

As Klement recalled those faces on the flight line, he felt the plane reach altitude and level out. Sitting back in the web-seat, he removed his jacket, and for the first time in weeks, the lightweight Kevlar vest that had been a present from his brother.

Klement wished that he were going home directly, but his first and most necessary stop was Hungary, where his brother’s body had been found. Although few details were available in the garbled message that he received, it seemed that Karel had died while on a visit to Budapest. His brother had been thirty-three at the time, seven years younger than Klement.

The difference in their ages meant there was never much rivalry between them. The difference in character made them friends. Klement felt his hand move toward his pocket, but he did not retrieve the photograph of his brother that he kept in his wallet. He saw the image with the clarity of a vision.

Karel’s arm rested on the hood of a limousine—a big glossy Tatra—parked before one of the hotels on Wenceslas Square. He smiled like the owner. The black and white tones caught the proprietary smile and the cocksure assumption of wealth in his stance, but not the brilliance of his blue eyes or the coppery changes of his curly brown hair. Nor did the photograph record the words of the old woman who sat behind Klement on a bench when she spoke to her companion as the shutter clicked: That is the best-looking boy in Prague.

In all Prague?

That was possible. Klement might have thought so, too, but the woman’s years lent authority to her words. Afterward, that was the way he always thought of Karel.

So his brother became rare. That feeling increased when their father died and Klement became a substitute parent to Karel—the guardian of his truancies. When Karel lost his bicycle to bullies, Klement retrieved it at some risk to his manhood. When Karel was arrested at the university for anti-social behavior, it was Klement who guaranteed the future conduct of his brother. There would be no pissing on the Russian flag, in any public place, forever.

After his release from prison, Karel seemed to have absorbed the lesson that power had to offer. He had been beaten when they took him up. He had been beaten in his cell. The two ribs and the arm that were broken made Karel aware of his mortality as warnings never could. From that time, a model of conformity replaced the student firebrand.

Of course the incident shadowed the rest of his life. Although Karel completed his studies near the top of his class in archeology, he had never been assigned as a leader of any project of importance. The last excavation he had undertaken, at Castle Luchov in Slovakia, was a laughable excuse for malingering at the expense of the people.

At least that was how Karel had described it. He had written Klement a letter several weeks ago in which he derided his work. There was no money for anything but the wages of the men on site, and no objects of interest beyond a rather complex rubble. The excavations at Hrad Luchov would make his fortune, Karel said, because the results would threaten no one in Prague.

Yet the letter seemed contradictory, for Karel had mentioned his Alchemical dream. He said that he was having it again—this time in real time. Klement had no idea what that meant, but he knew the dream, because his brother had told it to him. The theme was natural for a boy growing up in Prague, which had long been a center for that sort of claptrap. The dream involved turning base elements into precious metal. Great mounds of gold were always found on a shelf among Karel’s books.

Klement did not know why he thought of these things. He did not usually dwell on sentimental memories. He had trained himself to accept casualties. So he said to himself that this was his brother who had died, which explained almost everything. And this was Budapest where the plane would land, which accounted for anything else.

* * *

Klement had not been to Budapest in years, but the passage of time did not display itself well. At a distance, the first city of Hungary nestled the Danube like a gentle lover. Closer to the mark the temperament of its people ruled.

The taxi ride from the airport, befitting the nation with the highest suicide rate on earth, was maniacal. Traffic moved at fierce speeds when it moved at all. Cars parked on the sidewalks, and drove on the sidewalks when it suited them. Klement found small comfort in the fact that if the chaos resembled anything, that thing was Africa.

The Third World. It seemed incredible that Central Europe, once as civilized as any part of the continent, had been reduced to a backwater. Was it only yesterday that the might of the Russian army and the logic of Marx threatened to convert the entire world to the same beggary? When was the discovery made that it was not an economic system but a method for distributing booty?

Klement supposed that no one was to blame. For most of his life, he imagined that he served a cause that held claim to the future. He had seen it work time after time. The people arose to overthrow their masters, then settled down to the looting that might last a year—or a generation. The method was a supreme illusion, because it worked so well in war. The problems were all with the peace.

In spite of the changes that had taken place in the last months, the past lingered everywhere in Pest. The shops displayed furnishings that in the West were bestowed on dogs. When first-rate items were to be had, lines queued blocks long for the latest in athletic shoes and tee shirts. On every street corner, moneychangers plied their trade, hawking favorable rates in Western currencies. They spoke to Klement in English—in dollars—assuming, because of his tan, that he was an American.

He found it was not unpleasant to be taken for that—the winner. The notion seemed a fond counterpoint to the feeling that there were less of the things he loved in the world, and more of sadness.

Unfortunately, that feeling did not survive the experience of checking into his room at the Mihaly. It was a second-class hotel with first-class prices and a staff that seemed interested in nothing but gratuities in foreign currency. Klement would have liked to find better lodging, but hotel rooms were scarce in Budapest, and Karel’s superior, Valtr Mackova, had arranged these. He had sent the message to Klement, saying come at once, because the presence of a family member—Karel had no other—was necessary. The message also said that Mackova would join him in Budapest as soon as possible.

As soon as possible, Socialist Mean Time. Mackova had not yet claimed his room. The clerk at the desk seemed insulted that anyone should ask, and emphatically had no idea when the professor would arrive.

Klement wondered if Mackova would appear at all. Prague was an hour from Budapest by air, but no doubt more important things—such as lunch with a colleague—were on the professor’s calendar. Almost anything might serve to divert him from the task that waited at the Magyar Ministry of Health.

Klement decided not to wait. That Ministry was only five blocks from the hotel by a series of turns that proved more interesting than he thought. Gracious Jugendstil apartments flanked terrifically ugly modern buildings of no style or taste whatever. One of those, squatting hard near Engels Ter, looked like a pastel toilet tank. That was his destination.

Luckily, he found no lines in the corridors, or the reception area on the second floor. That might mean not many foreigners had the bad grace to die in Budapest recently. Klement was further surprised to find that when he gave his name at the desk, he was immediately conducted to an office and a desk commanded by a Mrs. Kolar.

She was a middle-aged woman with classic Hungarian, which was to say, Central Asian features. Her hair had been dyed in the remarkable hennaed shade of red, or dark orange, which was still seen on the streets of the city. Surely, it had been fashionable in her generation, which was still, of course, in power.

Herr Zeman.

Klement answered her German. He would have no more thought to speak Hungarian, a language that was impossible, than she would speak Czech, equally impossible.

You are the brother of Karel Zeman, deceased.

Yes, said Klement, though that, too, for the first time, seemed impossible.

The death of a foreign national, and the removal of the body from this country, requires positive identification and the completion of certain formalities.

Of course.

Identification will also be required of you.

Klement handed over his passport.

A moment.

Klement did not understand what was necessary to compare his picture with himself, but it seemed there was plenty. Frau Kolar vanished through a door that said Transit, or Transport, from which she did not soon reappear.

Instead, a tall man with an exceptionally dark visage and a large heavy nose entered the room through the same door. He said that his name was Zoltan Nagy, that he was an Administrative Assistant, and that it was his task to further the proceedings by identifying the body.

Klement did not look forward to the event, but he was gratified by any advance in the bureaucratic process. He followed Nagy into the corridor and across the hall, where they entered a small elevator.

Nagy tweaked the buttons and spoke as the rough gears got underway. I see by your documents that you have diplomatic status.

Yes.

Then you are a diplomat.

If it pleases you.

Something in that dark face found pleasure in the idea. When you view the body, you may find that you are unable to speak, he said. In that event, you may simply nod your head.

I will find the words.

Some do not, he said.

Klement tried to maintain calm. Possibly this fellow was doing his job with what he supposed was courtesy. But thank you for your consideration.

Nagy closed his eyes reverently, dropping his head as if he might bow. And if perhaps you would like to exchange some money . . .

In the field, Klement would have knocked Nagy on his back, or bounced his head off the panel of unlit lights. What he suggested was doubly annoying because it did not make sense. Nagy knew that Klement was Czechoslovak. No one would exchange korunas for anything, even Hungarian forints, because both were equally worthless.

No, thank you.

Then perhaps later.

I said no.

Nagy still did not want to give up his pursuit of the black market, but Klement’s tone struck the right nerve. The young man did not speak again as they left the elevator on the basement floor, crossed the hallway and entered a room by a banded metal door.

They were met by a man in a white coat whom Nagy chose to call Zsigmond. He seemed wholly a creature of this cellar, with a face shaped like a paw, gargoyle eyes, and lime-white skin that seemed painted to outline.

This is the corpse from Castle Hill?

Yes, said Nagy.

Such a pretty boy, said Zsigmond, as he turned to a rack that held clipboards. Taking one down, he spoke in the same carefree fashion. Come along.

Preceded by Zsigmond, Nagy and Klement passed down a hallway and entered a long white room. Although a flea could have been seen in relief on the flare-bright walls, Klement observed little detail. He knew that his brother lay in one of those vaults like one of those dynastic specimens that he had been educated to bleed for the information to describe the passing of an age.

In a technologically advanced society, said Zsigmond, this would be done by television.

Television?

To reduce the emotional stress, said Zsigmond. Viewing the body on a screen in a separate room allows for precision without the pain of physical confrontation. He smiled, and the cartoon face broadened by several strokes. No doubt in the capitalist millennia, we will have such things.

It is a matter of monies, said Nagy. Always.

Because Klement had good peripheral vision, he knew that Nagy looked at him when he spoke. Again, Klement made no return. He kept his eyes tightly on Zsigmond until that fellow stopped before one of the vaults—number 10A—and put his clipboard under his arm.

You must look closely, he said. Mistakes have been made. This is due to the—shall we say—pallor.

It was more than that. When rigor mortis ended, the flesh collapsed into a wet bag of skin and bones. Only cold rooms like this could stave off that condition.

Then it was done. Announced by sounds like pulleys in a dungeon, the drawer of the vault tumbled open and the slab rolled toward Klement bearing the effigy of a human being he had once loved. Because he had foolishly promised that he would speak, he did.

Yes, he said. That was my brother.

* * *

Both Zsigmond and Nagy seemed surprised when Klement asked to examine the body closely. It was as if no one had ever drawn back the plastic sheet to look upon the completeness of death and the handiwork of technicians.

A huge Y-shaped incision ran from Karel’s neck above the breastbone to his abdomen, where the major organs had been excavated for testing. It continued from his belly button down each leg. Somehow the method of modern science seemed worse than death—a dark patchwork of violation in synthetic thread.

Zippers. In flesh.

Except for that, Klement saw no anomalies. No bruises or contusions. Nothing in the flattened planes of the still handsome face said more than the usual: Hello, I’m Karel Zeman. I will never die.

When Klement asked to see the Autopsy Report, Zsigmond gave it over without much ado, which was to say, after several demurrals. Again, Administrative Assistant Nagy appeared as Klement’s ally in defeating bureaucratic procedure. He insisted that viewing the document could do no harm. This was true, though beside the point, which was simple inertia.

While Nagy excused himself—to speed the paperwork—Klement followed Zsigmond to a door along the hallway set with the frosted name of Dr. Zsabo. That was Zsigmond, as unlikely as it seemed.

Seated in his personal domain, surrounded by sullen mementos of his life—a photograph of his wife and children—another of himself as it had appeared in the newspaper on the occasion of a political murder—Zsigmond assumed a more professional air. Even the cutout face seemed to acquire more color.

Klement sat in a badly sprung leather chair before the desk while he read the two-page form in Hungarian. Reluctantly, Zsigmond supplied the translation when Klement’s knowledge of the language failed. That role as intermediary, in the end, seemed to make the fellow more tractable.

What does this mean? Klement pointed to a line at the bottom of the second page.

Zsigmond did not look at the form. He knew it. That entry details the results of the tests for chemicals in your brother’s blood.

These tests are guaranteed accurate?

Not one hundred percent, he said. But there is no doubt in this case. Chromatographic analysis shows that your brother had taken dextroamphetamines—Dexedrine—perhaps as much as twenty-five milligrams in the hours before his death.

Dexedrine. What Klement knew of the drug was that it made the senses keener and kept back sleep. He had taken it himself on those occasions when sleep would have meant death. But why had his brother, an archeologist, needed that kind of stimulation? What had been so important that he refused rest?

Could the drug have been administered without his knowledge?

You mean introduced into his food, or the like?

Yes.

It’s possible.

Or injected?

Unlikely, said Zsigmond. We examined the body carefully for punctures.

Yet you sound less than one hundred percent certain.

Correct, said Zsigmond, who seemed to have gotten his professional back up for the first time. If an injection were made by a person with medical training, the puncture would be difficult to detect. It is possible we could have overlooked it. We would be more certain if we had found evidence of ingestion by capsule or tablet in the stomach.

But you did not.

We found no residue, said Zsigmond. But that in itself is not proof. There were few contents of any kind in your brother’s stomach. Apparently, he had not eaten for several hours. The amphetamine might pass through quickly, especially if he were a habitual user.

A habitual user?

Zsigmond nodded. The stomach, better than most organs, adjusts to repeated dosages of any substance—food, liquids, drugs. It passes on the contents precisely because they are familiar.

My brother did not habitually take drugs. He was a scientist.

Klement knew he had spoken badly even before the lines of a frown dented Zsigmond’s brow. The voice that sounded in the small office had been clotted with emotion. That was the reason professionals did not like to deal directly with consumers. Klement was sorry that his feelings had caused him to become one. Now, he would have to hold for a lecture.

Scientists are not immune to irrational behavior, said Zsigmond in a voice so patient that it seemed to roar. Quite the contrary. The incidence of drug abuse is seldom higher than among physicians. So it seems that the question is not one of intelligence, or training, but access.

I don’t believe that’s true, said Klement without anger. Karel would not have better access to amphetamines than any man.

I will take your word for that, said Zsigmond, who was gratified at the return to calm. But it appears that he was also intemperate in his drinking habits. He pointed to the next point on the form—the numbers 1.5. A high level of alcohol was also found in his blood.

Karel was drunk, too?

To a degree, said Zsigmond. This figure does not indicate complete inebriation. Your brother could walk, talk, and do most other things, though perhaps not with facility.

A drug addict. A functioning drunkard. It was as if Karel had spent the last three years in a campaign to desecrate his memory. Klement wanted to say it was a lie, but the evidence spoke differently, and he believed—more than most men—in facts.

Are you telling me that Karel was a habitual pill-taker? And a drunkard?

The latter is probably not true, said Zsigmond. In the case of alcohol abuse, we usually find fatty accretions in the liver—and the heart. We found no evidence of either in your brother’s body.

But Karel died of a combination of drugs in his system. You are certain.

We know the drugs were in his body, said Zsigmond. We are not sure what killed him. The alcohol and amphetamines could have contributed to his death if he had a weak heart, but we found no abnormalities. And no clotting in the coronary arteries.

Then what caused his death?

The technical term is arrhythmia, he said. "The heart beats by electrical impulse. There is a regular discharge from two nodes. But sometimes the electrical pathways function improperly.