What difference does it make? he thought. No matter how strong my legs get, they’ll never be strong enough. I’ll never play football again, not like before. I’ll never be what I was going to be. So why bother?
But—because he really did love her—he willed himself to keep his mouth shut. As his mother finally turned away from him, he looked across the bright kitchen at the window over the sink. He could see outside into the sunlit morning. He could see through the branches of the cherry tree to the front yard, and beyond the front yard to the street. He could see beams of sun falling on the scene and patches of blue sky above.
At least it’s a nice day for it, he thought. And he thought: His mom was right—a walk probably would be good for him. It wouldn’t kill him anyway.
He put his head down and picked up his fork and continued eating his breakfast. He did not look up at the window again.
So he never noticed the green van parked out there, beyond the cherry tree, beyond the lawn, across the street against the far curb. He never even saw it.
But the people inside the van—they saw Rick. They had a camera with a powerful zoom lens trained on his window, and they watched him on the video screens they had set up behind the van’s driver’s seat.
And they waited for him to come out.
3. CRASH DAY
RICK STEPPED OUT of the house. As he moved down the front walk, he was slumped over his crutches like a marionette hung from a hook. He barely lifted his eyes from the concrete paving stones. He moved past the lawn toward the sidewalk with a slow, jerky shamble. With three days’ growth of beard, with his hair overlong, flopping down into his eyes, with his flannel shirt hanging untucked over his worn-out jeans, he looked like a panhandler searching for pity and spare change.
He came to the end of the front path and continued hobbling on his crutches down the sidewalk.
His street, Oak Street, was lined with modest houses, lawns, and trees—oaks and maples overshadowing the pavement, their leaves turning bright yellow, bright orange, and red. This early on a Saturday morning, there were a couple of families heading out to the mall or one of the reservoirs—a woman walking her dog—but mostly it was quiet. Cars stood still in driveways and on the street, parked by the curb.
Including the green van—which Rick still didn’t notice—and the people inside, watching him, tracking him, taking his picture.
It was a short walk to the corner, but it took Rick a long time, nearly ten minutes. Partly because of the weakness in his legs—because he had to pause to rest every couple of steps—partly because he just didn’t care enough to hurry. By the time he reached the intersection with Lincoln Avenue, he was breathless and sweating under his shirt despite the pleasant chill in the fair October weather.
He paused where he was, standing under the yellow leaves of a broad maple, scanning the quiet streets of the small town. Putnam Hills, New York. A nowhere place a couple of hours north of New York City. Nothing special. Good fishing in the local reservoirs. Hills for hiking and limestone caves for exploring. And the sprawling campus of the university where his father used to work.
Rick wondered if it was too soon for him to turn around and go home. Would his mother be annoyed with him if he came back through the door only minutes after he’d left? Or would she finally leave him in peace, let him return to his video games without nagging him? As he considered the question, his eyes swept over the scene—and paused as he saw a panel truck rattle by the corner of Lincoln and Elm.
The sight of the truck made him grimace. Something sour came into his stomach. It was a truck just like the one that had plowed into his silver-blue Accord four months ago—and it was just at that corner, just there.
It happened less than a month after his father had done his disappearing act. The beginning of June, a week after graduation. Summer was coming, but a cold rain was falling hard out of a slate-gray sky that day. Rick was driving to meet Molly for a run at the indoor track at the college, but his mind wasn’t on it. He was wrapped up in his own angry thoughts. Daydreams about facing down his father. Shouting at his father, nose-to-nose. Telling the old man what a hypocrite he was. To have pretended all these years that he was a God-fearing person of decency and integrity, faithfulness and honor—and then to just walk off, to just dump his wife, their mother, to just abandon them, his kids, because some old girlfriend came back into his life. To disappear with nothing more than a note of explanation. As Rick drove through the rain, he kept thinking of all the things he wanted to scream into his father’s face.
While he was thinking that, his car passed through the intersection. He barely slowed for the Stop sign. Without warning, he heard the scream of an oncoming horn. Startled out of his own thoughts, he looked up. For one split second of pure shock and terror, he saw the front grille of the panel truck driving toward his window.
That was the last thing he remembered. After that, there was only the hospital. The surgeries. The pain.
Standing on the corner now, Rick shook his head. Enough of this. His walk down memory lane was over. He was going home, going back into his room, back to his video games, no matter what his mother said. He had forgotten how much he hated coming out here. Out here where the memories were waiting. Where the very air seemed to taunt him with his bad luck, with all that he had been and would never be again.
Working his crutches in a circle on the sidewalk pavement, he turned around—and was startled to see a woman standing inches away from him, blocking his way.
She was in her thirties, compact and trim, with short black hair and hard, serious features. She was wearing a black suit—black jacket, black slacks—with a blue blouse beneath, buttoned to her throat. Her face was hard, expressionless, all business.
“Hello, Rick,” she said in a low, deep voice. “My name is Miss Ferris—and this is Juliet Seven.”
Rick stared at her for a second, thinking, What? Then he became aware of the green van that had somehow pulled up to the curb beside him. A moment later, he also understood that when the woman said “This is Juliet Seven,” she was indicating someone standing behind him.
Clumsy on his crutches, Rick turned to see there was, in fact, someone behind him now. A man—a tremendous man—bigger than Rick—who seemed for all the world to be made out of wooden blocks. His head was square, his torso a rectangle; his arms and legs were huge rectangles, too.
Juliet Seven? The guy was a monster!
The monster’s face was as blank as the woman’s face—at first. Then, he grinned.
“How you doing, Rick?” he said—and he jabbed a syringe into Rick’s neck.
Rick had time to gasp. To think again, What . . . ?
Then fog and dark closed in around him. His eyes rolled up in his head and he caught a glimpse of the sky as it fell away from him into spiraling nothingness.
4. THE ASSASSIN’S CREED
MURDER WAS JUST a job to Reza. Someone paid him to kill and he killed. It didn’t matter who gave him the money. It didn’t matter who had to die. He didn’t think about it much. He just did what he was paid to do.
Today, it was a Russian. The man was staying at a small hotel in a white town house in Earl’s Court, a busy corner of London. He had phoned for a car to take him to a restaurant across town in Soho. The car showed up at 6 p.m., just after dark. Reza was the driver.
The Russian got in the backseat. He was talking on a cell phone. “I understand,” he said into the phone in English, “but we can’t trust his methods.” He shut the car door and gestured to Reza in the mirror: Get going. Reza nodded and put the car in gear.
He drove about a quarter of a mile, then turned the car into a pleasant and secluded little alley off busy Cromwell Road.
“Excuse me,” the Russian said. He was speaking to Reza though he was still holding the cell phone to his ear. “This isn’t the right way. Where are we going?”
Reza brought the car to a stop. Turned in his seat. Smiled politely. And shot the Russian twice in the ches
t with a silenced 9mm pistol.
The Russian slumped where he sat, dead. His hand fell to his side, still holding the cell phone. Reza could hear a voice chattering on the other end of the line.
Reza left his gun on the seat of the car, got out, and walked away. He came out of the alley and blended with the crowds of pedestrians on the busy city street. Earlier, he had parked an old Citroën nearby—his escape car. He reached it, got in—and escaped.
An hour and a half later, he arrived at a small airfield outside the city. A Piper jet was waiting for him on the tarmac, its single engine already running. Inside, his old friend Ibrahim was waiting for him. The two men sat across from each other, comfortably ensconced in tall blond-leather armchairs. They were the jet’s only passengers. A stewardess brought them each a gin and tonic.
“Look at your face, Reza,” Ibrahim said, shaking his head. He was a squat, tubby man with a round face and a thin mustache. He was dressed casually in gray slacks and a colorless windbreaker.
Reza—a slender man with lean, sharp features—lifted his hand to stroke his chin. “What’s the matter with my face?”
“It has no life in it anymore. No passion. No faith. You used to fight for a reason. For a cause. You used to fight for the God. Now . . .” Ibrahim shrugged. “You’re empty inside. I can see it.”
Reza didn’t answer. He sipped his gin and turned to look out the window as the jet taxied to the head of the runway. The aircraft paused for a moment, then fired forward and raced into the wind. A moment more, and its wheels left the earth and it shot skyward.
Ibrahim was right, Reza thought, watching the distant skyline fall away, watching the night sky fill the windows. It was true: He had lost his passion. He had lost his faith. He had once believed the God was on his side, that the God would help him to win his battle against all those who did not believe. Then came the New York mission, and everything had changed.
He had been one of a small group of men living in Brooklyn. They had developed a plan to set off a number of bombs in Grand Central Terminal at rush hour. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, would have been killed or maimed. The entire city—the entire United States of America—would have been crippled with terror. Reza had never doubted he would succeed. The God would make sure of it. The God would be with him every step of the way, helping him to destroy the infidel.
But that’s not the way it happened. Instead, the American FBI had infiltrated his group. Three of his brother bombers had been killed in a gunfight. Five others had been arrested. Only Reza had escaped, unharmed.
Unharmed, but not unaffected. As Ibrahim said, his faith was gone. He believed in nothing now. He fought for nothing. He sold his skills and killed for money. And yes, he was empty inside. But the truth was: he didn’t care.
“What you need, my friend,” Ibrahim said now, raising his voice over the noise of the jet, “what you need is a new god to believe in. Or, at least, a man who is as powerful as a god, a man who can give you what you want: the cities of America on fire. Her people in chains. Her rivers running with blood.”
Reza turned from the window and looked at his friend. “Is that where you’re taking me? To meet such a man? My new god?”
Ibrahim raised his glass as if to make a toast. “You don’t believe me,” he said. “But you’ll see.”
They flew for four hours. When they began their descent a little after midnight, Reza judged they were somewhere off the coast of Africa. As the jet sank lower, he could make out dark patches in the white-capped ocean: islands, unlit, probably uninhabited. He didn’t ask where they were. It didn’t matter to him.
They landed on a dirt airstrip in the middle of a dense jungle. Reza could see the black shapes of the trees against the starlit sky. A long limousine met them on the tarmac. They rode together in the backseat. There was nothing to see out the windows but deep darkness.
“Have you ever heard of a man who goes by the name of Kurodar?” Ibrahim asked after a few minutes.
Reza gave a small start of surprise. “I saw him once. In Afghanistan. Someone pointed him out to me. A small, ugly little Russian. They acted as if I was supposed to be impressed.”
“You should have been,” said Ibrahim, his round head bobbing up and down. “You should have been. He may be small and ugly. He may even be Russian. But he is a great genius.”
The limo went through a gate in a barbed-wire fence, past guards armed with automatic rifles. It came to a stop outside a building. It was hard to make out in the darkness, but the building seemed faceless, a large, square white structure with few windows.
Ibrahim led the way inside, showing his identification to the rifleman at the entrance, pressing his eyeball to the scanner that opened the inner doors.
The two men moved shoulder-to-shoulder through an enormous lobby, empty except for the thick, round pillars that held up the ceiling. They reached a silver elevator at the rear. Ibrahim pressed his thumb into a sensor, and the elevator door slid open. Reza followed the squat man into the box. The door closed immediately and the elevator started down. It seemed to descend for a long time.
When the elevator door opened, Reza found himself in a long, windowless corridor lit by cold, blue-white fluorescents. As he walked beside Ibrahim through yet another checkpoint, Reza found himself beginning to feel excited. It was a startling sensation: the first excitement he had felt in a very long time. America on fire, he thought. Her people in chains. Her rivers running with blood. After all the failure and frustration, was it possible that his dream could still be realized? If there was a man who could give him that—yes, he would fall down and worship him.
They had reached a final door: a heavy slab of steel like the door of a bank vault. The rifleman stationed there nodded at them. Ibrahim punched a code into a keypad, then put his eye to one sensor and his palm to another. With a loud grinding noise, the huge door slid slowly open.
Ibrahim stepped back and made a theatrical gesture toward the room beyond.
“Enter, and find your faith,” he said.
Reza hesitated a moment—then moved through the entranceway.
He came into a cramped, shadowy chamber. He stood before a chaos of screens and wires, panels and flickering monitors. It took a moment before his mind could make any sense of it, before he could see and comprehend what was there in front of him . . .
Then Reza—even Reza—a man who had killed more people than he could remember—who had waged war and practiced torture and committed every manner of atrocity—even he staggered back a step, choking down his disgust at what he saw. The slimy white-and-purple thing strapped to the chair in the center of the room. The pulsing arteries connected to plastic tubes. The shuddering wires linked to the naked brain. The open torso. The flashing screens. The huge, staring eyes . . .
“Behold your new god,” said Ibrahim.
Reza stared in openmouthed horror.
He could not tell where the man ended and the machines began.
5. A JUST CAUSE
THE DARKNESS AROUND him was so complete, it was a moment before Rick realized he had awakened and opened his eyes. He could see nothing—nothing at all. He closed his eyes tight and opened them again. No difference. Just darkness. Frightened, his heart beating hard, he sat up. With one hand, he felt a stark metal surface beneath him. With the other hand, he reached out into the blackness to see if anything was there. Nothing. He felt nothing.
Dizziness and nausea swept over him. He stared and stared in every direction. In every direction . . . darkness. Nothing.
And then—out of nowhere—right in front of him: a train appeared! An enormous, sleek-nosed, silver bullet of a locomotive speeding toward him through a gray dawn.
It was so sudden, so impossible—and Rick was so startled—he couldn’t react. Frozen in terror, he watched, helpless, as the train raced at him head-on, growing larger and larger. Only at the last moment, as the huge machine filled his vision, did Rick try to dodge it, throwing his body to the side in a de
sperate attempt to get out of the way.
An instant later, with an awful sound—a metallic shriek that seemed to come from everywhere around him—the train leapt off the track. Sparks flew, blindingly bright. The great silver locomotive heeled over and its side scraped against the earth, throwing up a gout of friction fire. Rick, lying on one shoulder, watched helplessly as the machine skidded wildly, as its coupling buckled, as its rear cars whipped around in his direction.
Then the whole scene vanished.
Just like that, the train was gone. The darkness was everywhere again.
Blinking, gaping, totally confused, Rick sat up, looking this way and that.
“That was in Canada, outside Vancouver, eighteen months ago.”
Rick caught his breath. He turned toward the voice. What he saw was impossible. A man was suddenly standing a few feet away from him, completely visible, completely illuminated even in the surrounding dark. It was as if the man were lit by a light inside him, as if he were made of light.
Rick closed and opened his eyes again, thinking the illusion would disappear, as the train had. But the man was still there. He was real. It made no sense.
The man was middle-age, maybe fifty, maybe older. He had silver hair and a craggy face pulled downward in what seemed a permanent frown. His bushy silver eyebrows hung over deep-set eyes that had no humor in them. He was dressed in a gray suit and a white shirt and a black tie. When he moved toward Rick, he seemed to glide through the air, his footsteps soundless. The way he did that—and the way he was all lit up in the blackness—was truly weird.
“Who are you?” said Rick. “Where am I?”
“My name is Commander Jonathan Mars,” said the man. “I’m the director of the MindWar Project. You’re in an underground facility, not very far from where you live.”
“MindWar . . . ?” Instinctively, Rick reached up and touched his own face—to make sure he was real, to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. “You drugged me. That woman . . . that giant guy—he stuck a needle in my neck . . .”