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About the Author
Copyright Page
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This is for Carol & Bill Galante, Lisa Brackmann,
and for Dana Fredsti & David Fitzgerald.
And, as always, for Sara Jo.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always I owe a debt to a number of wonderful people. Thanks to John Cmar, director, Division of Infectious Diseases, Sinai Hospital of Baltimore; Dr. Steve A. Yetiv, Professor of Political Science, Old Dominion University; Michael Sicilia, formerly of California Homeland Security; the International Thriller Writers; my literary agents, Sara Crowe and Harvey Klinger; all the good folks at St. Martin’s Griffin: Michael Homler, Joe Goldschein; and my film agent, Jon Cassir of Creative Artists Agency. Thanks to Patrick Seiler of the Raymond James Group; Doug Davis and the wonderful people of Kearny Pearson Ford in San Diego; Krisztal Alexis Garcilazo; Kevin J. Bartell; Patrick Freivald; Ralph Morgan Lewis; astronomers Lisa Will, David Lee Summers, Philip Plait, and David McDonald; and Jake Witkowski (creator of the Joe Ledger Heart Attack Sandwich). Thanks to Chris Wren, Daniel Foley, Paul Bosworth, David James Keaton, Lisa Kastner, Thom Brennan, and Robert Gregg Barker, for technical information.
Thanks and congrats to the winners of the various Joe Ledger contests: Jay Faulkner, Tom Erb, Sinh Taylor, Joseph Capozzi, Tricia Owens, Otis Carlisle, Diane Sismour, James Florida, Will Divine, Christel Sparks, Linda and Sheldon Higdon, and Lou Emanuele. Thanks to Tony Eldridge of Lone Tree Entertainment and Dotonna Isham of Vintage Picture Company.
PROLOGUE
Where were you when the lights went out?
That’s the question, isn’t it?
What’s your answer?
Were you caught by the dark, frozen into the moment, suddenly reminded that civilization and the comfort of infrastructure are just a garment we wear? A fragile convenience. Did the sudden dark remind you that all of the things we expect to be there for us, to protect us, shelter us, provide for us, are fleeting and finite?
Were you one of the cynical ones, the doomsday-prepper types who saw everything go dark and, for one moment, stood there with a smug smile, gratified by the substance of your own prophecy? And then a moment later it caught up to you that there are a great number of things about which you never want to be right.
Did you think it was all a mistake? An error? A fault in the system, or bad wiring in the grid? You were absolutely sure someone was going to come and fix it.
Any.
Second.
Now.
Were you one of the unlucky ones who slept through the first hours of it, accepting darkness as ordinary and correct, only to be called awake by something we civilized people have forgotten about? Silence.
Did you try your cell? Your landline? Your laptop? Did you go old school and turn on the TV only to find that the cable was as dead as the lights?
There was a moment, wasn’t there? When you realized that the lights weren’t coming back on. That maybe they wouldn’t. That maybe they couldn’t.
What did you feel right then, at that moment when the truth whispered to you from the darkness?
What was the content of your thoughts, the constituents of your prayers?
Tell me.
When it all went dark, did you think it would last?
And last?
Or did you think—as so many did—that this was the end? The actual “it.” The stopping place, not just of the world as it was, but of your life as you needed to live it?
In that moment, what did you think? What did you believe?
Where were you when the lights went out?
Me?
I was trying to keep those lights on. Trying to hold a candle in the darkness. Losing ground with every step.
And when the lights went out I fell into the big, bottomless black.
PART ONE
THE GOD MACHINE
Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
—William Shakespeare
Macbeth
CHAPTER ONE
THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
For the record, I don’t believe in this stuff.
No goddamn way.
There’s possible, there’s improbable, there’s weird, and there’s no-fucking-way. This is a mile or two past that. So, no, I don’t believe in it.
What pisses me off is that it seems to believe in me.
CHAPTER TWO
THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
AUGUST 19, 11:41 A.M.
I was four minutes away from calling it a day and cutting out early to catch an Orioles-Padres game at Petco Park here in San Diego. Hot dogs loaded with everything that’s bad for me, ice-cold beer in big red cups, and the opportunity to spend a few hours yelling at a bunch of young millionaires trying to hit a little ball with a big stick. Baseball, baby. The American pastime.
It was the first game I’d managed to catch since the craziness at Citizen’s Bank Park last year. You know what I mean. The drone attacks on opening day. I’d spent a lot of the rest of the spring in hospitals. A bunch more time in rehab, then way too much sitting behind a desk doing paperwork and feeling my ass grow flat. Then I went back into the field and since then I’ve done nothing but run.
The Big Bad for us right now was ISIL. The press writes about them like they’re a disorganized goon squad who are only a threat to the notoriously unstable governments in the Middle East. They’re not. They’re a whole lot scarier than that. Most of the people running them are former officers from Saddam’s army. These are experienced soldiers who have been nurturing grudges. That was bad enough, but now they’ve upped their game and have put several special ops teams in the field. Real pros, too, and they managed to scoop up leftover Kingsmen from the ruins of the Seven Kings organization. Was it weird that ISIL was using shooters who were not Muslims? Yup. Very weird. And very scary, too, because it allowed them to come at us in unpredictable ways. A bunch of their SpecOps fighters were Americans, so even with the heightened security and paranoia here in the States following the drone stuff, we were feeling some rabbit punches from them. Attacks on power grids, an attempted sabotage of a nuclear power plant. Like that.
And our super-duper computer system, MindReader, has been picking up some hints about a really big attack planned for the US of A, and if the rumors were true then it was going to involve some kind of electromagnetic pulse weapon.
So, yeah … bad guys. Really scary bad guys, and they were causing a whole lot of very serious trouble. We had DMS teams running joint ops with the CIA and Homeland, with Barrier in the UK, with Mossad in Israel, and with a dozen other special operations crews.
Overall, I was busier than a three-headed cat in a dairy. That’s not to say I spent all of my time in the field kicking terrorist ass. Mind you, I’m still a gunslinger for Uncle Sam, but now that I run the Special Projects Office I’m also management, which
sucks six kinds of ass.
Baseball kept calling to me, though, and today was the first time I could reasonably justify leaving the shop early to have some actual fun.
The phone began ringing while I was tidying my desk.
If you work in a bank, an insurance company, or pretty much most jobs, you can pretend you don’t hear that call. I know cops at the ragged end of a long shift who swear their radios were malfunctioning.
But when you do what I do, you have to drop everything else—your time off, your family, your friends, even baseball—and you take the call. Kind of like the Bat-Signal. You can’t just blow it off.
So I answered the call.
It was my boss, Mr. Church.
“Captain Ledger,” he said, “I need you on the next thing smoking. Dress warm, it’s going to be cold.”
I looked out the window. This was August and the Southern California summer was cooking. Temperature was eighty-eight in the shade. I was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt with surfing pelicans on it.
“How cold?” I asked.
“This morning it was minus fifty-eight.”
I closed my eyes.
“I hate you,” I said.
“I’ll manage to live with your contempt.”
“Okay,” I said, “tell me.”
INTERLUDE ONE
OFFICE OF DR. MICHAEL GREENE
EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK
WHEN PROSPERO WAS ELEVEN
“Are you going to talk today?” asked the psychiatrist. “Or are you still mad at me?”
The boy sat in the exact middle of the couch even though it was not the most comfortable place. He was like that, preferring precision over comfort. It was reflected in the number of pieces of food he would allow on his dinner plate, the number of tissues he would use no matter how many times he sneezed. Numbers mattered in ways that Dr. Greene was still discovering. So far the psychiatrist had been able to determine that Prospero Bell believed that math, in all its forms, was not merely a way to calculate sums, but was in fact tied to the very structure of physical reality. He’d even made himself a hand-drawn T-shirt last year that had a quote from mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss: “God arithmetizes,” itself a variation of a quote Plutarch famously attributed to Plato: “God geometrizes continually.”
Prospero was very tall for his age, but thin as a stick. As he perched on the couch, his long body seemed to be temporarily suspended, as if he was about to slide down between the two big leather cushions but chose not to fall. Always awkward and always strange, and he did not seem to ever fit into the world as it was. Dr. Greene knew that this reflected the boy’s inner life. After four years of therapy, the doctor was quite convinced that this boy lived in two entirely separate worlds. The one inside, where Prospero clearly felt he belonged, and the one outside that he loathed and resented. That discomfort, and the resulting disconnect from ordinary social interactions, was the basis of their frequent sessions.
“I never said I was mad at you,” said the boy. He was eleven and his voice was beginning to deepen. No cracks or squeaks, just a timbre that hinted at the baritone to come.
“You threw an apple at me last Thursday,” said Greene.
“It was handy.”
“That’s not my point.”
Prospero gave him a microsecond of a sly grin. “I know.”
“Then—”
“I didn’t want to talk about my father anymore and you wouldn’t shut up. I didn’t hit you with the apple.”
“You tried. I ducked.”
“No,” said Prospero, “I missed. The fact that you ducked says more about you than my ‘missing’ says about my aim. I wanted to miss. You didn’t want to duck, but you did anyway because you didn’t know that I wouldn’t have hit you.”
Today the boy wore a green cloth jacket that he had systematically covered with symbols from cabalism, magic, and alchemy. Greene knew this because there had been three full sessions about those designs. Now there was a gray hoodie under the jacket, the top pulled up to throw shadows down over Prospero’s thin, ascetic face. The boy had painstakingly drawn an elaborate and technically excellent monster on the hood. The thing had a bulbous, flabby body, stubby wings, and a beard made from writhing tentacles that trailed from the gray hood onto the green material of the jacket.
Greene met with Prospero three times a week, down from the five talks per week that marked the boy’s most extreme phases, up from the twice weekly of last year when Prospero seemed to be balancing out. Greene was therapist for the whole Bell family, including the father, Oscar Bell, a major defense contractor; Oscar’s current wives; and his long line of ex-wives. Greene also did occasional check-ins with Prospero’s older brother from Oscar’s first marriage. Greene’s sessions with the rest of the family were routine, sparse, and almost pointless. They didn’t need him and he privately found them intensely dull. The older boy was a clone of his father and would doubtless become fabulously wealthy building secret, terrible things for the American military. As the Bell family had since the Civil War.
Of all the Bells, Prospero was the one who logged frequent-flyer miles on Greene’s therapy couch.
Greene asked, “What would you have done if I wanted to keep talking about your father after you threw that apple?”
Prospero shrugged.
“No,” said Greene, “tell me.”
The boy nodded to the coffee table. “There were five other apples in the bowl. I can throw pretty good.” He shrugged again, point made.
There was no bowl on the table now. There was nothing there, not even magazines. Greene was moderately sure the boy wouldn’t throw the table itself.
“Is it your opinion that hitting me with an apple is the best way for us to proceed?”
“We didn’t have that conversation, did we?”
Even after all these years and all these sessions it still unnerved Greene that Prospero never spoke in an age-appropriate way. He never had. Even when he was five years old his intellect and self-possession were remarkable. Or maybe “freakish” was a more accurate term, though Greene would never put that in any report. Freak. It was the best word, then and now.
Prospero Bell was a freak.
None of the tests Greene or his colleagues had administered had been able to accurately gauge the boy’s intelligence. Best guess was that it was above 200. Perhaps considerably above that, which lifted him above the level of any reliable process of quantification. Prospero had completed all of his high school requirements last year at age ten, and passed each test with the highest marks. The boy’s aptitude was odd, though. Savantism is generally limited to a few specific areas—math, say, or art. Occasionally a cluster. But Prospero seemed to excel at everything that interested him, and his interests were varied. World religions, folklore, anthropology relative to belief systems, art, music, mathematics in all its aspects, science, with a bias toward quantum and particle physics.
He was now eleven.
But he was also deeply read in areas that were built on less stable scientific ground—cryptozoology, metaphysics, alchemy, surrealist art, pulp horror fiction. The boy was all over the place. The rate at which Prospero was able to absorb information was only surpassed by his ability to both retain and process it. He had a perfect eidetic memory, and it seemed genuine, without any of the mnemonics of someone who uses tricks or triggers to recall data. Prospero never forgot a thing he learned, and because he was so observant that meant that he possessed an astounding body of personal knowledge. Greene had given Prospero tests to determine what kind of intellect the boy had, but the results had been confounding. Prospero had marked fluid intelligence—indicating that he was able to reason, form concepts, and solve problems using unfamiliar information or novel procedures—but he scored equally high in crystallized intelligence, which meant that he possessed the ability to communicate his knowledge, and had the ability to reason using previously learned experiences or procedures. People seldom scored that high in both a
spects. And he did just as well with long- and short-term memory, memory storage and retrieval, quantitative reasoning, auditory and visual processing, and others.
Greene felt that his “freak” diagnosis was the most clinically accurate assessment. There was a lot of savantism in the world, but there was no one like Prospero Bell. The question that burned hottest in Greene’s mind was what the boy would do with all of that brainpower. He had hinted that he had a plan, but so far had kept that secret to himself.
Prospero’s intense hatred and distrust of his father was a common topic for them, and the old man wanted Greene to determine the best way for the elder Bell to gain the trust of his son. Not the love. All that mattered to Oscar Bell was a useful trust.
But that was only a secondary goal for Greene and he didn’t devote much time to it. Instead he focused on something he found far more interesting. It was also the thing that most deeply concerned Prospero.
Prospero was absolutely convinced that he was not human. Not entirely.
And he was equally convinced that he was not from this world.
CHAPTER THREE
SEVENTY MILES NORTH OF THE VINSON MASSIF
ANTARCTICA
AUGUST 19, 10:01 P.M.
“What’s the op, Boss?” asked Bunny, the big kid from Orange County who looked like a plowboy from Iowa. His dog tags said he was Master Sergeant Harvey Rabbit, but not even his parents called him by his first name. Bunny was the muscle and in many ways the heart of Echo Team. “Those ISIL shooters find a two-for-one sale on snowshoes?”
“Funny,” I said. “But no.”
We were aboard an LC-130 Hercules, a big military transport plane fitted out with skis. None of us liked the fact that our plane had to have skis. I had a third of Echo Team with me. Two operators: Bunny and Top—First Sergeant Bradley Sims. My right and left hands.
“We going way down south to get out of the summer heat?” drawled Top.
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