by Nick Cook
I manage to keep my voice level. ‘And Voss’s security pass?’
‘Voss was perfect casting. Have your marksman take down the terrorist with the bomb on live TV, thus demonstrating the lunacy of the President’s peace initiative. Then take down the President. Two birds, one stone.’
Jesus … He was allowed into the Plenary because they wanted him there. And he went because he had seen what they had in mind.
‘How did they get their hooks into you, Reuben?’
‘Because they knew,’ he says.
‘About Iraq?’
‘About everything.’
He rolls over and looks at me. His skin is puffy, his eyes red-rimmed. ‘One shitty, tiny slip, Josh.’
He’s talking about the family that died in Fallujah, and his subsequent cover-up of the tragedy.
‘Why didn’t you go to Thompson?’
‘And have them leak what happened to the press? My career would have been over. Or worse. You saw what they did to Gapes. Lefortz. Anders. Jimenez.’
I did see what they did to Gapes. And Lefortz. I had a ringside seat. At a time when I hadn’t realized that the President’s dream wasn’t a dream at all, but a prophecy.
‘You need to focus on getting better,’ I say.
There’s something manic about his laugh. ‘What the fuck for?’
‘Because things can change.’
‘Yeah? Like how? I’m going to jail for a very, very long time.’
‘That doesn’t mean your life is over.’
‘Is this you talking, or God? I get confused.’
‘The President is pushing for a full congressional hearing – an opportunity for the facts to emerge. There will be a trial, too, of course, but you know Thompson. The Oval Office is more about truth and reconciliation these days than judgment and retribution.
‘You have no idea how things will play out, Reuben. None of us does. But in a year or so, when the Grid is back online, there will be no hiding place. From hereon in, everybody will need to be mindful of what they say and think.’
I clamber into the Lexus. The engine is running, the heater on full.
‘Well?’ Hetta says.
‘He’s not good.’
‘Do you care?’
‘Yes. Strangely, I do.’
‘Fuck, Josh. Sometimes I don’t know if I’ll ever get you.’
‘He came close to killing himself. Would you feel better if he’d succeeded?’
She appears to give this quite a lot of thought as she maneuvers the car right then left onto Massachusetts Avenue.
‘No,’ she says eventually.
‘I didn’t want to say this to Reuben, but something that Kalunin told his daughter has stuck in my mind. He said that on the Day of Judgment, we judge ourselves.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I think it means a number of things.’
‘Like?’
‘Like, we have to take personal responsibility for our actions. But also, shit happens.’
Like nuclear weapons and the World-Wide Web.
Like not being able to wind back the clock.
Like the holosphere is real. It’s here. And soon, we’ll need to learn how to live with it.
Hetta pulls up close to where I’ve parked, around the corner from the Supreme Court. I thank her for the ride.
I’m heading to my mother-in-law’s place for a couple of days. Since I got back I’ve felt a yearning to be close to Pam. There are some things I have to tell her. And I have Hope’s painting in my car. It belongs at the Five Pines.
I also have this feeling that there may be clues to Jack’s past hidden in the one thing nobody would ever have thought of searching: his old Impala.
‘Josh?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry for all the things I said.’ Hetta hesitates. ‘About Hope. Sometimes, I can be a little … You know …’
‘The traffic wasn’t all one-way.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’ve been a little obsessive myself.’
‘Will you be back?’
‘In a few days.’
‘Then?’
‘How about dinner? Or would that be … inappropriate?’
‘No.’ She smiles. ‘I’d like that.’
Then: ‘Josh?’
I turn.
‘There’s something different about you. Funny –’ she smiles ‘– I never noticed till now.’
‘My leg?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s … better.’
I’ve been meaning to tell Mo too.
As I make my way north, out of the city, the horizon widens.
Inquiries are underway into the acquisition system that, for decades, has allowed our defense and intelligence agencies to buy weapons and services beyond the scrutiny of our elected officials.
The probes will examine how former government employees like Duke Gapes, Matt Voss and Karl Dempf were able to drop off the map in support of activities like the Grid and Triple Z’s assassination agenda.
Thompson has promised that – like the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission formed on the back of Watergate – these inquiries will be transparent. All their findings will be made public.
The irony, of course, is that the conclusions will emerge around the time the Grid is back online.
As Thompson made clear, its control and development will come under the auspices of the UN – and it’s anyone’s guess where this will lead. Opinion seems to have polarized. Those of us brought up in the shadow of the Cold War are fearful and cynical. The next generation, for the most part, have embraced it.
Since Jerusalem, a permanent peace camp has been established in Lafayette Square under the banner ‘No More Secrets’. Thompson sees it every morning when he goes to work.
Meanwhile, the ramifications of arrests here and in Russia persist.
A 3D printer was located during a search of the Ilitch Foundation’s office in Jerusalem’s Old City. Thompson’s defense advisers are in crisis mode over what to reveal about Gen 4 nuclear weapons and the capacity of psychics to initiate the fusion process.
There is still considerable debate about whether this is even possible. The advice of our labs remains that it isn’t. And, based on what’s been passed to us by the Russians, there is no evidence that anybody has achieved the psychic collapse of a ballotechnic initiator.
No trace of the DT pellet was ever found. The Engineer really was unarmed. Which leaves the cabal unraveled. They were relying on him to tick the suicide bomber box.
The Secret Service says his body was disposed of at sea, like bin Laden’s. No grave, no martyr’s shrine.
But all kinds of stories have emerged online, some of them, apparently, peddled by sources within the Service: that there never was any burial at sea; that the Engineer’s body simply vanished from the morgue where it was taken after the shooting.
As to his past, the press has many more questions than answers.
It seems that wherever he traveled, his focus was entirely on healing division. There are tales of cures and miracles.
The media haven’t yet tracked him back to the Iraq–Syria border, but there’s a good chance, when they do, that they will come across the incident Christy Byford shared with me, prompted by Hetta’s request to the Department of Defense for details of Gapes and Offutt’s Black Hawk crash.
The Engineer was in Ma’a Helwa – the tiny border village of Sweet Water – when the gunship fell to earth.
What did Gapes see? What did I?
I have revisited the events of the past three months many, many times, and what happened in the tower will never leave me. I know that somewhere – in a realm science has yet to find the words to describe – there is a place where Hope, our daughter and I are together; a place that is separated by the thinnest of membranes from the plane we insist on labeling ‘reality’.
It is here, perhaps, that we judge ourselves, as Kalunin put it, against al
l the thoughts, feelings and emotions that are laid bare for all to see, ourselves included, in the holosphere.
If this is the case, perhaps we will all think twice about the pain that we inflict before we go right ahead and do it.
According to the data Kalunin handed to the apostolic nuncio, evolution isn’t just the fundamental impulse of species, but of existence itself – which was also divined by the intuitives who’d ‘viewed’ the information held within the particles that subtend everything we see and touch. If the data is correct – if, at the end of our universe and all the others that have preceded it, it gets ‘read across’ to a new one, encoding it with lessons learned – then, I guess, a rebirth of some kind has to take place.
Perhaps, too, consciousness operates on the same principle. We live and we learn. And we die. But it lives on. I haven’t asked him yet, but maybe this is what Stani was trying to tell me on the ferry: the four stages of consciousness he’d mapped for the spook scientists at the Stanford Research Institute.
It is here, meanwhile, as Hope had said, that we learn; where we grow.
I think often about the Engineer. I always will.
As he lay dying, what was he trying to show me?
Proof of what?
Proof of the deeper reality Thompson promised to deliver via the Grid?
Or something deeper still?
The romantic in me wonders how close he came to saying, as he lay at the foot of the President’s podium, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’
Before visiting Reuben, I spent time with Thompson in the Oval Office, just the two of us. I found him thoughtful, but excited by the opportunities that lie ahead.
I asked him what he made of the Engineer trying to hand him a photo of the box he had made at the Southern Cross.
‘Do you believe in co-agency?’
I told him I wasn’t even sure what that was.
‘I don’t speak about my time at the Southern Cross because it was profoundly upsetting. You saw that during our hypnosis session. Even as a kid, it got me to thinking about the insanity of man’s inhumanity; and, doubly insane, how its more twisted advocates called upon religion to justify their deeds.’
When he showed no sign of continuing, I’d prompted him. ‘Co-agency …?’
‘One night I started to pray for the strength to stand up to Pastor Green, and the wisdom to deal most effectively with people like him.’
‘What happened to the box?’
‘I still have it. It goes everywhere with me.’
He walked over to his desk and opened a drawer – the same drawer, three months previously, from which he’d removed the Daily Brief with its details of the slaughter of the innocents in Yemen.
He placed the box on the table between us and invited me to open it. A comforting smell of wood and polish greeted me as I lifted the lid. Inside was a piece of frayed paper – a page from a school notebook.
‘The morning after I prayed, I went to the school library,’ Thompson said. ‘Every volume had a religious theme, except for one. A collection of poetry. It fell open at a particular page. “Only Breath”, by Rumi, a thirteenth-century Persian. I read it, and wept. I wrote it out and tucked it in there. That’s what you’re holding.’
I started to read.
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion
Or cultural system. I am not from the East
Or the West, not out of the ocean or up
From the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
Composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
Am not an entity in this world or in the next,
Did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
Origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
Of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
Worlds as one and that one call to and know,
First, last, outer, inner, only that
Breath breathing human being.
As I handed the box back, Thompson turned to me. ‘I still think of Kit Harper, you know, the kid who threw himself under a train because of the torment meted out by Green and his henchmen. I have tried since to honor his passing, Josh. To let him know that his life—’
His voice caught as he looked away and returned the box to its drawer.
I thought back to what Stani had told me. That some of us have a purpose in life and some of us have a purpose in death. But that we all have a purpose …
Before parting, I shook him warmly by the hand, then became suddenly aware that I was holding on too long. ‘Just one more question, Mr President?’
He nodded.
‘When did you know for sure that the Engineer hadn’t come to kill you?’
I’ll never forget his smile.
‘Afterwards,’ he said.
I look up. Over the steering wheel, I see the rolling hills of Pennsylvania.
Co-agency was an idea that Thompson had become familiar with at Princeton. It described the way God acts in the world when we align our will with His.
Like Rumi, the Engineer had been raised a Sufi.
But he’d also been brought up a Christian.
In searching for anything else that linked him to Thompson, I came across another of Rumi’s poems, which included the Engineer’s final words to me:
Say I Am You.
And at that point, something shifted in me.
I realized, finally, that the connectedness and the physics were one and the same, and that they were bonded by a thing each of us at some fundamental level knows and understands.
A thing called love.
And with that shift came something else.
The knowledge, at last, that I am free.
Dramatis Personae
Tod Abnarth – Senator; Reuben Kantner’s former boss
Eric Abram – WWII veteran; sold Josh and Hope his home on the point
Jack Ackerman – Hope’s surrogate father
Tobias Anders – Captain, Special Tactics Branch, Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, D.C.
Arturo – sidekick of Pastor Green, the Southern Cross (Thompson’s school)
Nils Bogarten – WMD expert, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Misty Buckhannon – Lou Gapes’s sister; Duke Gapes’s aunt
Admiral (Retired) Christy Byford – President Thompson’s National Security Adviser
Tom Cabot – Director, US Secret Service
Josh Cain – The President’s doctor and White House Medical Director
Hope Cain – Josh Cain’s wife
Katya Dedovic – Lawyer at Collins Lovelock Land, Washington D.C.
Karl Dempf – Consultant/mercenary with Triple Z Services; ex-Army Afghan vet
‘The Engineer’ – Jihadi terrorist
Colonel Nelson ‘Tom’ Freeley – Former Marine Corps flyer, Vietnam
Duke Gapes – Ex-Marine
Hank Gapes – Duke Gapes’s father
Louisa ‘Lou’ Gapes – Duke Gapes’s mother
Haight Graham – White House Special Agent in Charge; Lefortz’s successor
Pastor Green – Principal at the Southern Cross
Kit Harper – Thompson’s classmate, the Southern Cross
Hetta Hart – Special Agent, intelligence division, US Secret Service
John Hayden – Head, Presidential Protection Division’s Counter-Assault Team; former US Army, Iraq
Reverend ‘Isaac’ Hayes – Director, Georgetown Presbyterian Mission (a charitable shelter for the homeless), Washington D.C.
Vladimir Ilitch – Moscow-based oligarch
Raoul Jimenez – Sniper, Special Tactics Branch, Metropolitan Police Department, Washington D.C.
General Zan Johansson – Commander, JaySOC (Joint Special Operations Command), US Army; organizational head of the US’s ‘war on terror’
Professor M. M. Kalunin – Russian acade
mician; Ilitch’s father-in-law
Reuben Kantner – Chief of Staff, the White House
Heather Kantner – Reuben’s wife
Dr Elliott Kaufmann – Physicist at the Baltimore Central Institute of Technology; colleague of Schweizer at Harvard
Dr Mo Kerchorian – Progressive psychotherapist; studied with Josh under Ted van Buren at Georgetown
Stanislaw Koori – ‘The world’s greatest psychic’
Charles Land – Senior partner at Collins Lovelock Land, Washington D.C.
Jim Lefortz – Special Agent in Charge, US Secret Service, the White House
Sister Martha – Nun at the Church of St Mary Magdalene
Marty – Security guard, office building on 16th Street
Mikey – Hetta Hart’s brother and cop
Sasha Mikhailovna – Ilitch’s wife
Molly – Josh Cain’s personal assistant
Patriarch Nikolai – the Primate of Moscow; head of the Russian Orthodox Church
Major Cal Offutt – US Army; former colleague of Duke Gapes
Dr Kate Ottoway – Forensic pathologist, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Washington D.C.
Pam – Hope’s mother
Dr Joel Schweizer – Computer scientist; colleague of Kaufmann at Harvard
Joe Seitz – Assistant Press Secretary, the White House
Colonel Dmitri Sergeyev – Military Attaché, Russian Embassy, Washington D.C.
Steve – Paraplegic ex-Army vet, the Settlement, Washington D.C.
Robert Thompson – The President of the United States
Jennifer Thompson – The First Lady
Ted van Buren (TVB) – Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Georgetown University; Josh’s mentor
Susan van Buren – Professor of archaeology; TVB’s wife
Vasiliy – Sergeyev’s sidekick
Matthew Voss – Ex-Marine
DJ Wharton – Special Agent, US Federal Bureau of Investigation
Cody Wyatt – Small-time criminal, Blacksoil, West Virginia; former friend of Duke Gapes
Acknowledgements
The Grid had been in my head for a long time before I began to write it, and so remembering everyone who has helped me along the way is an imperfect and risk-filled endeavour.
First, I am indebted to my friend, the writer and playwright Simon David Eden, for his advice at key junctures of the narrative. Simon’s insights – his gift for plot and character especially – helped me at moments when I really needed it. To have the guidance of another writer during what is essentially a solitary undertaking was an extraordinary gift. My pal, and Helena, thank you.
