Nest

by Terry Goodkind

  He leaned toward her, fire in his expression. “Stoned to death. Murdered by the community. The whole community takes part in the murder. It excites the crowds because it’s linked to our genetic makeup and the breeding rights of dominant males. Women who violate those primitive laws of nature by choosing who they mate with are eliminated.

  “Killing has a long history of being public. Executions were attended by great numbers of people. Christians were fed to the lions. Gladiators fought to the death before cheering crowds. Witches were burned at the stake. Look at how people are slaughtered by the thousands in the Middle East for the crime of being the wrong religion. Islamic children are taught to carry out executions. Murder is a central part of their upbringing. This is a civilized world?

  “Infants have the ability to fear before they are taught anything. Why? No one teaches them fear. They are born ready to fear other humans, because humans are by nature predators, killers. We fear other humans from birth.

  “What do parents tell their children? ‘Don’t talk to strangers.’ It’s a part of the long human struggle between both sides of our nature—predator and prey. In dark times it was common to murder all the children of an enemy people in order to eliminate them growing into a threat. Preemptive killing.

  “Your ability to recognize a killer by looking into their eyes is a development of that inherent fear of human predators. It’s the same thing, but fully developed.”

  Kate picked a small piece of meat out of her egg roll and put it in her mouth. “I can understand an infant being afraid of strangers, but I don’t see how I could have developed this ability I have from that.”

  “Some people are better at art, or music, or dancing, or running, or math, or whatever.” Jack circled a finger in front of her. “You have your own unique, inborn skill set.

  “Over tens of thousands of years of evolution we learned the many clues that add up to threat. Our mind does it without conscious thought. Those instincts help to keep us safe.

  “In your case, a genetic mutation gave you a higher ability in that particular area, one which others lack. You are able to see killers for who they are. They evolved a counter-mutation that helped them survive. They can see those like you.”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SIX

  Kate took a drink out of her water bottle. He still hadn’t gotten to the central issue she wanted to know about, so she asked him.

  “So what are nesting events? I kind of get the general idea simply from the context, but I don’t know exactly what they are or how they fit into this whole history of good and evil.”

  “The struggle of the light and the dark, conveyed through gods and demons, has been part of mankind’s history for eons. They’re an expression of what we can’t see, a way of understanding the struggle within us all.

  “We are god, as it were, and we are the devil.”

  Even as he said it, a wider understanding was beginning to dawn on her.

  “What I did for the Mossad was to fight against darkness,” he said, “against those who lust to kill, but it was only one place. What is happening there is merely a sign of what long ago began to happen in the whole of the world because that same mechanism is connected to all of mankind. It’s not isolated to one area or one type of people. It’s a universal connection.

  “That’s why I’m writing A Long History of Evil—to explain those connections and how they are all interrelated, how they all lock together into the puzzle that is our story.”

  Jack leaned in and picked up a container. He took a bite of chicken and chewed for a moment. The silence in the room seemed oppressive. She felt a certain sense of dread at the way concepts were coming together in her mind. Connections she had never considered before were clarifying.

  “In some rare ancient books they described the growth of evil as ‘nesting events,’ ” Jack said. “They considered nesting events to be the bellwether of change, the manifestation of a new dark era revealing itself. They tended to express these ideas in religious terms, such as demonic influence and the like, but the concept is primal.

  “Life in those early times was as short as it was brutal. Death could come at any moment, on any day, swarming out of the woods around them, coming to slaughter them. Because of that, I think they were more attuned to the subtle indications of gathering danger. They saw the signs, heard the whispering hints of death approaching. They called these signs ‘nesting events.’

  “These movements between ages of expanding enlightenment and devastating dark times have centuries of momentum driving them. Change comes about over long periods of time as momentum gathers and picks up strength. These are swings that involve centuries and even millennia. Our lives are too short to perceive the changes.

  “Rome didn’t fall in a day. It began to crumble slowly. It took hundreds of years of hit-and-run invasions by a succession of savage peoples made possible by the rot of the character and drive of the Roman people themselves. At first, tribute held the forces of destruction at bay, but eventually brutality won out. The knowledge and advancements of mankind were lost as a great city crumbled.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Roman rule was no picnic, and it was often accompanied by brutal domination, slavery, and a murderous reign of successive despots, but it was a time of an expansion of knowledge and glorious compared to what followed when it fell.

  “That’s the history of mankind—a continual struggle between civilization and savagery. People alive today think that we’ve gotten beyond that, that we’ve reached equilibrium, that civilization has firmly established itself and mankind is advancing toward an ever better future.

  “But what they don’t understand is that evil, too, advances, develops, and grows. Evil, too, is always thinking.

  “I’ve discovered in the course of my research that as the pendulum swings back from ordered civilization toward a darker age, the gap between predator and prey narrows. They begin to intermingle in new ways. You are a part of that phenomenon. You are given rise because of it.”

  “I’m the light born to fight the darkness?”

  “In a way. Nature seeks balance. When evil rises, so do those who are meant to be the balance.”

  “Good grief, Jack, I’m no savior.”

  “No, but you are a part of how mankind evolves.

  “During nesting periods there is an ever-increasing unwillingness to enforce law and order on every scale, from neighborhood gangs to international terrorists. It’s that primitive trait for tolerance and placation at work. That creates the perfect environment for nesting events to spread.

  “Even in the best of times pockets of evil survive. When the time is right those nests grow stronger. When the environment is right, it begins to spread out and establish new nests.”

  “This nesting of evil spreads?”

  Jack thought for a moment. “In the ninth century, the Vikings were a horror show. Their brutality was as horrific as it was pointless. They liked to grab children by the ankles and bash their heads against walls.

  “Just like what that killer did with AJ’s son.

  “With the Vikings, it was slaughter for the sake of slaughter, for the sake of killing any but their own kind. They spread out, going to new places, conquering new territory, taking women for breeding.

  “That was a nesting event spreading.”

  “Sure, maybe in the ninth century,” Kate said, “but in this day and age—”

  “What do you think Islamic terrorists do with Christians or Jews they capture? Do you think they treat them in a ‘civilized’ or ‘humane’ manner?”

  Kate didn’t have an answer, or at least not one she wanted to voice out loud.

  “We are supposed to be a modern, civilized nation, and those bad things only happen in other parts of the world. Cities here, in our country, are supposed to be centers of culture. But look at how gangs have infected our cities. Over a period of a handful of decades, that evil has spread to all of our cities. All of them, now, are infected with
nests of this new evil. All of them are rotting from within.

  “That’s a nesting event, right here, right now.

  “For many people cities have become a nightmare place to live, like the dark ages, where predators run wild and kill indiscriminately. That’s an uncontrolled nesting event.

  “We have stood by, impotent and unwilling to do anything as North Korea gets nuclear weapons. That is a nesting event.

  “Iran has sworn to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and to destroy America, and what do we do? We help them get nuclear bombs so they can do it.

  “That is a nesting event.

  “Those things and many more, small and large, are all nesting events, their tendrils connected by the very nature of our genetic makeup. We increasingly are unwilling to put criminals in jail to protect civilized people. We insist that it is unfair for any number of reasons and instead allow them to roam free to prey on the innocent. The average sentence served for murder today is, what? Seven, eight years? Something like that. For murder. That is a nesting event—allowing predators to live among us.

  “Evil does not remain a primitive force, the way we think it does, but networks in completely new and unexpected ways to multiply its power. Terrorists, for example, have learned to link together on social media and in the darknet. They stay ahead and out of reach of civilization. That is a nesting event.

  “Nesting evil depends on the benevolence of good people to do nothing, allowing it to grow. It depends on both fear and ignorance to gain strength. In the face of such growing evil, most good people are simply trying to live their lives. They turn to those in charge, who in turn urge tolerance and understanding—the traits that our ancestors learned as a way to placate murders. In so doing, the murderous nature of mankind is allowed to become dominant.

  “Nesting events take on many forms. When civilization ceases to be ruthless in eliminating the nests of evil growing in its midst, then evil becomes ruthless in eliminating civilization.

  “Remember our excursion into the darknet?”

  “It’s not something I will ever forget,” Kate said.

  “Bring me your computer and I will show you a nesting event in real time.”

  Puzzled, Kate set down her food and pulled her laptop out of her carry-on. She opened it on the coffee table.

  “Okay,” he said when a browser finally opened. “Now type in ‘torflow dot uncharted dot software.’ ”

  A page opened, and a sinister-looking map of the world appeared. The seas were dark, and the landmasses black. There were particles of light flowing from place to place.

  Kate was mystified. “What the hell is this?”

  “I’ll show you. There’s a graph along the bottom. Click on the left side, at the beginning.”

  The bar graph started in 2007. Kate clicked on the far left. There was suddenly much less activity on the map.

  “Each of those specks of light is an enormous packet of information flowing from place to place on the darknet. Now, click on the far right. That’s the present time.”

  When she did, the world seemed to erupt with rivers of light, flowing in massive streams all across the world.

  “This is a visualization of what is, for the most part, criminal activity. Each one of those thousands upon thousands of light particles represents enormous packets of information. What you are seeing is people buying drugs, buying guns, buying nuclear material, buying stolen identities, hacking intellectual property, buying human slaves, buying hits, buying forged documents, organizing terrorist attacks, hacking into everything from government sites to every company in the world to nuclear plants to oil rigs to aircraft to insulin pumps. Much of this is gigantic streams of data being siphoned from malware-infected machines and ferreted away to criminal syndicates.

  “Notice where most of the activity is taking place in the world? This is evil gorging on civilization.

  “Among all of this vast amount of activity, taking place every minute of every day on the darknet, is a tiny little site called Scavenger Hunt. A killer uploading your photos would be impossible to see on this page because that amount of data is so small in relation to all of the criminal activity taking place.

  “What you are seeing is evil nesting, worldwide, in real time. This is a nesting event that is running out of control. This is beyond the reach of any law enforcement or the forces of civilization. You can see from that bar graph at the bottom how this nesting event, once incubated in the darknet, has exploded in just a few years.”

  Kate stared, her eyes wide, at tiny specks of light so small they were hard to see individually, yet there were so many and they flowed in such dense masses they formed rivers of light that entirely blanketed some countries. The specks of light streamed from place to place around the world, city to city, going from relay to relay, forming webs of light engulfing whole countries.

  The scale of it all was nearly incomprehensible.

  “Jesus Christ,” Kate said under her breath.

  “More like Lucifer,” Jack said.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Kate stared, transfixed at what she was seeing, at what it represented. Such evil was difficult to comprehend.

  Jack gestured toward the computer screen with the container he was holding. “Like I said before. You can’t save the world.”

  “I believe you,” she said under her breath, still unable to look away from the sight.

  “This is a partial glimpse of the formation of what may be an extinction-level nesting event,” Jack said.

  “People go on social media all the time to express hate.” He gestured again at the screen. “Here, in the darknet, you can see that same kind of hate and envy put into action. Mankind has never before had such a perfect vehicle for spreading evil.

  “Think we live in enlightened, civilized times? This is a real-time depiction of the Huns coming over the barricades.”

  Kate looked from the screen to Jack. “So how does all of this become an extinction-level nesting event?”

  Jack picked with his fork at the food in the container he was holding. “Remember how I told you that appeasement was a mechanism to counter the aggressive nature of others? We promised the North Koreans food—booty—if they wouldn’t develop nuclear weapons. They developed nuclear weapons anyway.

  “The result of appeasement is a rogue nation willing to use a missile to explode a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere over the West Coast. The electromagnetic pulse would wipe out most of our electrical and technological infrastructure, effectively sending us back to preindustrial times.

  “In the insanely deluded notion that defending ourselves was immoral, we long ago denounced missile defense systems. So now we’re naked to an attack from a country as small and backward as North Korea. They have the potential to destroy the United States and start a world war. All because we allowed a nesting event to take hold.

  “In a deal with the devil we let Iran have nuclear weapons. This, after making that same mistake with North Korea.

  “Their leaders have told us in every way possible that they intend to wipe Israel off the map and that we are the great Satan and they will destroy us. To appease them, we gave them nukes.

  “China and Russia don’t really want to get into a nuclear war because they know they, too, would die.

  “Iran likewise knows that nuking Israel will start a catastrophic nuclear world war. But they think their purpose on earth is to start an end-times war. They may decide to die in such a war. We gave them the means.

  “So, if you’re Israel, and you know that Iran has vowed to kill you, and they have for years been sending rockets into your country and continually carrying out terrorist attacks killing innocent women and children to prove that they mean what they say, what do you do? Does the killer DNA in you decide that you need to kill Iran first? After all, that is the purpose of that genetic killer configuration: survival.

  “Once nuclear weapons are used, there is no stopping it. Every country
is going to feel they have to strike. Do you know the result of such an event?”

  “Nuclear winter,” Kate said.

  Jack nodded. “An extinction-level event.”

  Kate studied his face. He looked down into the container, stabbing something with his fork. He had spent years in the Middle East. He had worked with the Mossad. She wondered how much he knew. Whatever he knew, his expression didn’t betray it.

  “Is that what you think will happen? Nuclear war as the final result of man’s murderous genetic nature?”

  He finally looked up into her eyes. “Actually, no.”

  Kate was surprised. “No? But you said that this nesting period was an extinction-level event.”

  Jack chewed for a moment and then gestured to the computer screen with his fork. “There’s your extinction-level event, right there.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Nukes mean that everyone dies. Sure, there are people crazy enough to do it, but what did I say about our genetic code?”

  Kate frowned. “You mean that murder is hardwired into us?”

  “Right. Murder. Not suicide. Murder. The purpose of murder is to be the survivor, to have all the spoils from killing.”

  Kate looked at the computer screen. “So then how does this fit? How is this an extinction-level nesting event?”

  Jack waited until she looked back at him. “Not nuclear winter. Cyber winter.”

  “Cyber winter? I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Everyone around the world is preparing for cyber warfare. It’s not merely countries like China and Russia preparing cyber attacks, it’s North Korea and all of the Islamic world. Terrorists are preparing to unleash a new kind of terror. Hacktivists, lusting for anarchy, want to bring down Western civilization. The thing they all have in common is that they all want to be the ones left alive.

  “Military hacking all over the world is staffed by massive organizations, larger than any nuclear program. They’ve been hard at work, planting routines in everything electronic.