by Ted Dekker
Larkin had analyzed satellite images of Colorado, which showed some spectacular anomalies if you knew what to look for. He had conducted hundreds of interviews, analyzed the material from many of the buildings, and explored the canyon in question with ultrasonic equipment.
In the end, there was no room for doubt. Evil had indeed visited the small town of Paradise, Colorado, in a most stunning fashion twelve years earlier. What started out as a covert experiment to study the noble savage in a controlled environment had spun horribly out of control. The shocking events of Project Showdown required three hundred pages.
Robert had called David Abraham within an hour of reading Christian Larkin’s full report and insisted that he fill the role of his personal spiritual adviser.
He looked at David, who was watching him, calm now.
“Okay. Tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I have,” David said.
“You know what I mean, Father. I’m not making the connection here.”
“I’m not a priest,” David said. “But I appreciate your confidence in me. Can you look past the simple ways of man?”
Meaning what? Robert wasn’t a man of subtleties—he never liked it when David employed them to make his points. “Don’t tell me this decision I’m about to make has anything to do with what happened twelve years ago.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. But I have a feeling. I haven’t had a feeling like this for twelve years. I can tell you that this Iranian defense minister, this Assim Feroz, is not where he is by accident. He will be the destruction of Israel if you allow him.”
David stood and walked across the room, staring at the books. He’d always been a great lover of books. He collected them, tens of thousands of them. Some said that his was the most valuable private collection of books in the world.
“There is an evil stirring, Robert,” David said behind him. “I realize you would prefer some evidence, but nothing I can tell you would satisfy your demand for plain facts. I came here to tell you and the secretary that you must not, under any circumstances, yield to Feroz.”
“What do you suggest I do?”
“I suggest you pray, Robert. You do still pray, don’t you? For your son?”
“More than you know.”
“Then pray more. And know that Assim Feroz is your enemy.” He turned and faced the president. “Have you ever heard of a man named Laszlo Kalman?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, no.”
“The X Group, then?”
Robert frowned and shook his head. “No. Should I?”
“Yes, I think you should. But not from me. You should talk to the CIA.”
“What does this have to do with the initiative?”
David hesitated. “I believe they’re connected. I can’t prove it any more than I can prove any of this has anything to do with Project Showdown, but I have a very strong feeling, Robert. A feeling I haven’t had in twelve years.”
“So you said.”
A soft knock interrupted them. He knew that knock—two raps. It was his son, Jamie, who had carte blanche permission to join him in any unclassified meeting he wished during these last few months of his life. The doctors had given him two, but they all knew he would outlast any doctor’s prognosis. He had lived eighteen years with a very mild case of Down’s syndrome complicated by a congenital thyroid dysfunction that was supposed to have killed him before he turned four. Other than being short for his age, he showed no physical clue of his illness, unusual for those with Down’s.
His mind was a different matter. Although Jamie was eighteen, he had the mind of a twelve-year-old.
There was nothing that Robert and Wendy, his wife, loved more about their son.
“It’s Jamie,” he said.
David nodded once. Smiled. He had his own affection for children, didn’t he? It’s why he and Jamie have struck up such a friendship, Robert thought.
“Come in.”
The door swung open. A short boy, blond and sweet, stared at them with wide brown eyes. “Can I come in?”
“Of course. I’ve been expecting you.”
Jamie walked in and shut the door. His one love in life was politics. He lived and breathed the business of government, which in his simple world primarily meant scanning the news channels, listening to a good three hours of talk radio each day, and sitting in on whatever meeting his father would allow him to. It didn’t matter that half of it flew over his head; Jamie had a way with politics. His outlook on life gave him a unique insight into the public psyche. If Robert wanted to know how the American public felt about a certain initiative, nine times out of ten Jamie’s perspective would tell him.
In ways his staff would never truly appreciate, Robert credited Jamie for his ascent from Arizona governor to president. At his son’s suggestion, he’d revamped his entire campaign during the primaries, bought himself a Harley, and become the people’s man from Arizona. And that was only the beginning. His wife, Wendy, had once teased him that he’d won the presidency by thinking like a twelve-year-old.
The very least he could do for his son was to allow him unfettered access to a political life that most could only dream about. He took Jamie anywhere and everywhere that he could.
Jamie looked sheepishly from his father back to David. “Heavy discussion?”
“David thinks that Assim Feroz isn’t who he says he is,” Robert said. “What do you think?”
“I think Feroz is a bad goat,” the boy said. “I think he’s lying and won’t disarm anyone but Israel.”
“Really?” Robert lifted a brow and smiled. “What brings you to this conclusion?”
Jamie shrugged. “I don’t believe him.”
David put his arm around Jamie and faced the president. “Listen to your son, Robert. For the sake of his generation, listen to Jamie.”
6
Deep in the darkness beyond the black tunnel, a terrible enemy had gathered and was waging war against the light.
The light was a tiny pinprick at the end of the tunnel, and Carl’s mind and soul were fixated on that light. Two days or maybe ten days ago—he’d lost his sense of time completely—that light had been the murder of two people in the Andrassy Hotel. But he’d extinguished that light, as Kelly had asked him to. He’d learned long ago that if he didn’t obliterate certain memories, Agotha would, and he didn’t favor her methods.
Now the light at the end of his tunnel was survival.
He’d learned how to ignore the darkness and focus on the light by disciplined repetition. His ability to control his mind and by extension his body was his greatest strength.
In fact, his mind, not a gun or a knife, was his greatest weapon, and his handlers had helped him learn how to wield his mind in a way that few could.
The enemy changed shape regularly. Right now it was an intense heat that threatened to suck the moisture out of his body and leave him so dehydrated that his organs might stop functioning. But if he forced his mind to accept the impression that it was cool in the room rather than hot, he could maintain his energy for an extended period of time.
He sat crosslegged on the metal chair, willing his flesh in contact with the chair to stay cool, sitting perfectly still so the rest of his skin would not be unexpectedly scalded.
He’d slowed his heart rate to fifty beats per minute to compensate for the heat in the same way that he increased his heart rate to compensate for extreme cold. He did not eat or drink or pass any waste. These were the easiest functions to control. More difficult were his emotions, which seemed predisposed to rise up in offense at such treatment. In the worst conditions, he resorted to turning his emotions to Kelly. To her blue eyes, which were pools of kindness and love. The only such pools he knew.
All of this information registered as part of his subconscious, like a program that ran in the background. The light at the end of his tunnel remained at the center of his attention. Carl was so used to the torturous conditions of his pit that he no longer thought of them as torment.
They were simply the path to the light.
Agotha had asked him recently whether he thought he could ever step outside the mental tunnel. “If your tunnel protects you from threats, could you not deal with those threats offensively rather than merely defensively?” she’d asked.
“I am offensive,” Carl replied. “My aim is to survive.”
“Yes, and you achieve that aim very well. But have you ever tried to deal with the threats more directly?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“You ward off the heat by controlling your mind and changing the way your body reacts to it. Have you ever tried to change the heat itself?”
Was she suggesting he try to lower the room’s temperature? It was absurd, and he politely told her as much.
“Is it? What if I were to tell you that it’s been done?”
“How? When?”
“In many documented cases studied by science. The pH balance of water, for example, can be significantly raised or lowered strictly through focused thought. This was first published by William Tiller, PhD, in a book titled Conscious Acts of Creation. There have been dozens of studies by quantum physicists since. None of this fits well with the older understanding of Newtonian physics based on subatomic particles, but it makes sense in accepted quantum theory, in which waves of energy, not particles, form the foundation of the world we know. It is possible, Carl, to affect these waves. They are connected to your mind.”
“I can push an object with my hand and make it move,” he said. “I can’t do that with a wave from my mind.”
“Because you don’t think of the wave as an object.” She walked to the chalkboard and drew a dime-sized circle. “Imagine that this is an atom, one of the smallest particles we know, yes?”
He could remember this now that she said it. “Yes.”
She drew an arrow to the end of the board. “If an atom were enlarged to the size of a dime, the space between it and the next closest atom would be ten miles in every direction. There are a countless number of atoms that make up your hand, correct?”
“Yes.”
“But in reality, most of your hand is this empty space between the atoms.” She tossed the chalk into its tray. “This space, which was once thought of as a true vacuum, is actually a sea of energy. This is the zero-point field, most evident at a temperature of absolute zero. But it rages with energy at all times. Does this make sense?”
“This is all proven?”
“Yes. Finding ways to predictably influence this field is where theory takes over.”
The light in Agotha’s eyes was infectious. She smiled. “Do you know how much energy the empty space between atoms holds?”
“No.”
“A single cubic yard of this so-called empty space, this sea of raw energy known as the zero-point field, holds enough energy to boil away all of the earth’s oceans.”
Hard to comprehend, much less believe.
“I want you to begin thinking of ways to step past your safe walls into this sea of energy. Imagine that your mind is connected to other objects through the zero-point field, just like islands are connected to each other by the sea. Can you do that?”
The thought of going beyond the black tunnel of safety unnerved him.
“If you were to stand on your island—your mind—and send out a large wave toward another distant mountain in the sea, could you destroy that mountain? Or at least move it?”
“I suppose you could.”
“With an idea the size of a mustard seed, you could move a mountain,” she said. “It’s all a matter of perspective. When you first tried to see the light at the end of your tunnel, what did you see?”
“I closed my eyes and saw nothing but blackness.”
“And what did you feel?”
He hesitated. For some reason the memory of failure had never been stripped away. The first time they’d inserted a needle through his shoulder, he screamed until he passed out.
“Pain,” he said.
“But you found a way to construct the tunnel by pushing through the blackness to the light.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you should try to punch a hole in the side of the tunnel and push back the sea of heat. Change the heat, rather than just protect yourself from it. It’s theoretically possible.”
The discussion with Agotha had been a few days ago, perhaps a week, perhaps a year. No, it was recent, very recent. Now in the safety of his tunnel, seated on the metal chair in the very hot/cold place, Carl decided that he would try again. He’d managed to take part of his mind off the light without the tunnel collapsing around him only three or four times, but each time, finding a way beyond the black tunnel’s walls had proven too difficult.
It wasn’t easy to take even a fraction of his focus off the light. The light was his survival, his comfort, his life. He’d become very good at giving it his complete attention.
Splitting the mind’s eye was not unlike moving his physical eyes independent of each other, something he’d learned with great difficulty as a sniper. He moved now with caution, first allowing the tunnel wall on his right to come into his field of vision while never breaking contact with the light far ahead. He gradually began to isolate features on the tunnel wall.
The process was slow but fascinating. The tunnel protected him from the heat beyond. So far so good. He lingered there for an hour or ten, growing comfortable with his divided focus.
What if he could form a second tunnel to punch through the first tunnel?
The thought took him by surprise. The light faded, and for a moment he thought the tunnel had collapsed. But it remained straight and true, and the distant pinpoint of light came back into sharp focus.
He considered this new thought. Maybe a second tunnel of focus could break through the walls he’d constructed.
KELLY LARINE sat at a round metal table in the main laboratory, watching the monitor as the lines of numbers ran by. Carl’s vitals had held rock steady since he’d gone deep, nearly three days ago now. In terms of controlling his emotions, he was better than Englishman, who, although the more accomplished killer, seemed to have less control over his mind, which could in time make him the lesser of the two.
Then again, Englishman had appeared on the scene a full month after Carl and was already well ahead of him. He had come to them practically ready-made, which only eroded her own trust of the man. On occasion she couldn’t escape the vague notion that he was far more than who he said he was. More than even Kalman or Agotha knew. A puppet master who was simply playing games here while he waited for his true purpose to reveal itself.
Laszlo Kalman fears the man, she thought.
There were never more than three assassins in the X Group at any one time. Sometimes up to a dozen were in training, but in operation, only three. At the moment only two: Dale Crompton, known as Englishman; and Jenine, the dark-skinned, soft-spoken feline from the Ukraine. Neither of them had the same control over their emotions as Carl, but both more than compensated with skill and determination.
All three had full control of their vitals and had developed nearly inhuman thresholds for pain, although how Englishman and the Ukrainian managed so well without mastery over emotion was still a bit of a mystery to Kelly.
On the other hand, maybe their achievements weren’t really that much of a mystery. The training methods perfected by Agotha were all founded on a guiding principle that had yet to fail: the appropriation of identity. The assassins thought they were surrendering their memories, but Agotha wasn’t concerned with erasing memory as much as erasing identity.
Identity was the linchpin.
Commandeering a person’s identity allowed Agotha to manipulate the memories associated with who a person was and what he had done without compromising his knowledge of how things worked. How to operate a car, for example, or brush teeth, or kill a man in the most effective way depending on the circumstance.
Agotha Balogh wore the same yellow dress she so often wore,
always half-covered by a white lab apron. At the moment she was calibrating the powerful spinning magnets that she used in conjunction with powerful drugs to rewrite the identities. The machine was a common MRI machine, the kind found at any decent hospital, but its magnets had been adjusted to Agotha’s specifications. The drugs she’d been testing for the last decade, however, were evidently nothing so common.
Everything about the X Group was extraordinary, from the operatives they’d managed to sequester away in the hills of Hungary, to their incredible success rate, to the highly controversial techniques they used to train, to the personalities at the helm. Kalman. Agotha. And now she could add her name to that list. Kelly.
“No change?” Agotha asked.
It was a rhetorical question, to add some noise to the room. “None,” Kelly said. They returned to silence.
Kalman. Kelly knew little more than what Agotha had told her about his background. He’d killed his first man when he was eight. The dead bodies in his wake could not be counted, Agotha had said. Somewhere along the line he’d become convinced that the mind was man’s most powerful weapon, not a gun. His interest in manipulating the mind had started when he met Agotha at the University of Newcastle in the UK.
“What is this?”
Kelly looked at Agotha, who was staring at the monitor. She glanced back at Carl’s vitals.
“What’s what?”
“His heart rate,” Agotha said.
Kelly saw the numbers blinking on the screen. Saint’s heart rate had risen from roughly fifty beats per minute to ninety. They stared, caught off guard by the sudden change.
“How long?” Agotha asked. “Were you watching?”
“It was fifty less than five minutes ago. It’s been fifty since I came in half an hour ago. Did you check the logs from the last twenty-four hours?”
“Yes. He’s been static for more than forty-eight hours. Something’s happened.” Agotha hurried over to the computer and punched up his record. “Less than a minute ago. The rest of the indicators are steady.”
Carl’s pulse steadied at ninety-one beats per minute. Kelly watched for thirty seconds. The rate changed again.
