The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,50

it always was, and when wasn’t there a war on, somewhere, to keep a man like Richards in good employ? The last twenty years had been kind to him, a long run at the table with nothing but good news from the cards. Sarajevo, Albania, Chechnya. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran. Syria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Chad. The Philippines and Indonesia and Nicaragua and Peru.

Richards remembered the day—that glorious and terrible day—watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24–7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn’t even remember why. He’d thought it right then; no, he’d felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they’d all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war—the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more—the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are—would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn’t notice and couldn’t remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and mosques, in country and in city, in darkness and by day. It would be fought in the name of Allah or Kurdish nationalism or Jews for Jesus or the New York Yankees—the subjects hadn’t changed, they never would, all coming down, after you’d boiled away the bullshit, to somebody’s quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where—but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it.

Which was why NOAH had made a certain sense, back when it all started. Richard had been with the project since the beginning, since his first communiqué from Cole, rest in peace, you little shit. He’d known it was something important when Cole actually came to see him in Ankara, five years ago. Richards was waiting at a table by a window when Cole strolled in, swinging a briefcase that probably had nothing in it but a cell phone and a diplomatic passport. He was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his khaki suit, a nice touch, like something out of Graham Greene. Richards almost laughed. They ordered a pot of coffee and Cole got started, his smooth face animated with excitement. Cole was from a little town in Georgia, but all those years at Andover and Princeton had tightened up the muscles in his jaw, making him sound like Bobby Kennedy channeling Robert E. Lee. The boy had nice-looking teeth, too, Ivy League teeth, straight as a fence and so white you could read by them in a dark room. So, Cole began, think of the A-bomb, how it changed everything just to have it. Until the Russians set off their own in ’49, the world was ours to do as we liked; for four years it was Pax Americana, bay-by. Now of course everybody and his uncle was cooking one up in his basement, and at least a hundred rust-bucket Soviet-era warheads were floating around on the open market and those were just the ones we knew about, and of course Pakistan and India had burst the cherry with all their bullshit—thanks a bunch, fellas, you made incinerating a hundred thousand people over diddly-squat just another day at the office of the deputy undersecretary of the War on Terr-rah.

But this, Cole said, and sipped his coffee. Nobody else could do this. This was the new Manhattan Project. This was bigger than that. Cole couldn’t go into details, not yet, but for the sake of context, think of the human form itself, weaponized. Think of the American Way as something truly