The Moscow Meeting. James Frey

Spanish

      Finish reading Moby-Dick

      The last item has been on my list every year for the past five years, ever since my father told me I should read it because it’s the greatest American novel ever written. I hate not finishing things, so I keep putting it there hoping it will give me the incentive I need to get through Melville’s doorstop of a book. But in all this time, I’ve only made it through the first 100 pages, so I suspect it will be there again in 1949. I don’t know how the guy found so much to say about whales.

      As for the first two things on my list, I don’t know yet how I’m going to get them done, but I’m determined to do it. Only now, looking at my handwriting on the scrap of paper, do I realize that I’ve put finding Ariadne first. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe not. The longer I’m apart from her, the more worried I get that I’ll never see her again. I’ve never felt this way about anyone, and it’s making me more than a little anxious that perhaps I’m letting my emotions get in the way of what should be my primary concern—retrieving the weapon and taking it home. In order to get the box, I need to find her, so it’s all tied together. But what if it wasn’t? What if I had to choose one thing over the other? Would I look for her first, or the box?

      “It’s a little late for writing your Christmas list for Santa, isn’t it?”

      A man pulls out the chair across from me and sits down. I quickly pick up the piece of paper, fold it, and stick it in the pocket of my coat. “Yeah, well, I never get that BB gun I ask for anyway,” I say.

      The man is older than I am, probably in his forties. He’s tall and thin, with an angular face, dark eyes, and close-cropped black hair. His name—at least the one I’ve been given—is Charles Kenney.

      “Your journey here was uneventful, I assume,” Kenney says.

      I know what he’s asking. He wants to know if I think I was followed. “Pretty boring,” I tell him.

      “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here earlier,” he replies. “I had business to attend to elsewhere.”

      It’s been three days since I contacted my line back in America via shortwave radio. Using Morse code, I let them know that I’d located the item I was searching for, but that it had been lost again. I didn’t tell them how. I said I could get it back, though. They responded by telling me to go to Budapest and meet the man who is now looking at me intently from across the table. I assume he’s Cahokian, but I’ve never heard of him, and don’t know who he is or what he does, so I wait for him to tell me.

      “We’ve met before,” he says. “Although you wouldn’t remember it. You were only four years old, and it was only for a few minutes. I was one of the people who evaluated your brother to determine his potential as a Player. I left America soon after, and have been living in various places in Europe ever since. I’m sorry about what happened to Jackson.”

      I wonder if he’s referring to the story we were all told—that Jackson died in the war—or if he knows about the incident in Berlin. I don’t know what, if anything, I should say about that. Or about so many other things. Kenney is connected to my line, so I should tell him everything. Instead I find myself keeping secrets.

      “Sauer is dead,” I say, deciding to avoid the topic of my brother altogether for now. “He committed suicide in the room where the box was hidden, after triggering a booby trap designed to kill anyone in the room. He didn’t want us to have it.”

      “Us?” Kenney says.

      “The Cahokians,” I say, quickly catching my mistake. I can’t mention Ariadne or the Minoans to him.

      “Ah,” he says, nodding, as if maybe I meant something else. “I see. And did he say why?”

      “He said it was too dangerous for anyone to have.”

      “And yet he never destroyed it himself,” Kenney says. “Don’t you find that interesting?”

      I suddenly feel as if I’m being tested. I don’t like it. “It was the most important thing he ever worked on,” I answer. “He probably couldn’t bring himself to do it.”

      “Possibly,” Kenney agrees, although he sounds doubtful. “Or perhaps he was keeping it safe for someone else, and feared that if we took possession of it, the other party would never get it back.”