Saint (5 page)

“Are dead,” Kalman said.

Carl remembered that now. He was quite sure he'd asked these same questions dozens of times.

“As you will be if you fail.”

“You kill your own recruits?”

“Only when they fail. We all die.”

Maybe this was why he found Kalman obscene. But he didn't think so—deep down he understood what the dark man said.

“You'll spend two days in regression before your next training exercise,” Kalman said. He walked toward the door. “Take him to his quarters.” The director of the X Group left him with Agotha and Kelly, whose eyes he still avoided.

Agotha put her hand on his shoulder. She seemed enthralled by him, a scientist examining her prize specimen.

“I knew you could do it,” she said. “One day you may be stronger than Englishman.”

Agotha glanced at Kelly, then walked out of the room.

“You're upset with me,” Kelly said.

“Am I?”

“Yes, you are.”

Carl looked at her. “I'm confused. I'm not quite sure who I am. Or, for that matter, who you are.”

“Then I'll tell you who we are.”

She stepped up to him and reached out her hand. He took it only because she offered it in such a way that suggested she'd done so many times before.

Kelly led him from the room into a long, familiar concrete hall, offering no explanation of who either of them was.

His thoughts returned to the outburst of love he'd felt when he heard his son's name. Matthew. Even now the name pulled at his heart. How could that be, if it was only a name?

“I don't have a son named Matthew.”

“No. But we helped you believe that you did for the sake of this test. You acted under that pretense and you did precisely as you should have done. I'm very pleased.”

They walked through a door at the hall's end, onto a cement landing, then down five concrete steps that led to browned grass. She waited until they were twenty yards away from the building before speaking again.

“We have recording devices in all the buildings. I wanted to speak to you without being heard. I'm sorry for the confusion, Carl. I really am. Every time they do this to you, you forget that you can trust me.”

How could he answer that? She'd lied to him; he could never trust her. And yet he knew already that he not only wanted to trust her but would.

“What I did was horrible,” she continued. “I laid next to you and convinced you that I was your wife. That we had a child. Terrible, yes, but I did it for you.” Her grip on his hand momentarily tightened. “You have to succeed, Carl. My greatest gift to you today was convincing you beyond any shadow of a doubt that you loved me and would do anything for me, including shooting two people who offered you a plausible alternate truth. If you failed to show complete loyalty to the set of facts you were fed, you would be dead now, and I couldn't live with that.”

She looked at the forest, jaw clenched.

Carl's confusion lifted like a fog before the sun. He'd been here before, too, which only made sense. He was undoubtedly practiced at stepping out of the fog when presented with the right information.

In that moment, Carl heard the sincerity in her voice and knew that Kelly had done precisely what she said she'd done. She'd saved his life. There was a bond between them, which explained the emotions he'd allowed himself when he looked into her eyes as they laid tied to the bed.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It's just . . .” He didn't know what to say.

“Confusing,” Kelly said for him. “Their invasive techniques are designed to strip you of your identity and reshape you. They spent three days force-feeding you the fabricated memories prior to this last test. Now they've taken those memories from you with a simple injection. They've trained your mind to respond to their manipulation. But there are some things they can't take from you. Trusting me is one of them. Remember that, Carl. Please remember that.”

“I will.” He swallowed, unsure how he felt about anything, including the woman who led him across the browned field toward the bunkhouse.

Familiar. The bunkhouse made his stomach turn, but such an emotional reaction was unreliable. “Tell me who I am.”

“You're Carl Strople. Also known as Saint. Your memory has been stripped and reconstructed many times, and each time it becomes more difficult for you to remember who you really are. I won't bore you with the science behind it, but it's based on the relationship between memory and emotion that every human experiences. Here, a normal lifelong process is compacted into days, weeks, and months.”

“But
who
am I?”

“You were in the United States Army, Special Forces, when you were recruited for this assignment. You've never been married and have no children. When you first came to the X Group, a man named Charles was your handler. He was terminated and they gave you to me.”

“Why are you here?” he asked.

Kelly hesitated, then answered in a distant voice. “Because I survived the training just like you.”

“Then you're what they made you?”

Another break. “I suppose. I won't be deployed in the field. I'm here to help you make it in the field.”

“This is all an elaborate extension of the Special Forces? Why in Hungary?”

As soon as he'd asked the question, the answer came to him from his own memory. He answered himself.

“Black Ops. No one in the United States government has officially approved of these operations.”

“You're remembering. Good. And you'll quickly remember that Englishman is the most dangerous person in this compound, perhaps more than Kalman. You won't see much of him, but he's stronger than you. Be careful around him. Play by the rules and I'll make sure you survive.”

“I can't remember who my father is,” he said.

She didn't answer.

“Or my mother.”

Still no answer.

They walked up to the bunkhouse. It was made of concrete blocks with a single door. This was his home. The darkness inside, under the first floor, was bittersweet to him. He remembered. Once bitter, now sweet.

Kelly walked up to the door and pulled it open. “Do you remember your specialties?”

Carl followed her into an empty building with a concrete floor. A stairwell descended to their right. Kelly walked toward it.

He stopped and stared at the concrete steps. “I can walk into a dark tunnel,” he said. “Nothing will hurt me.”

She reached the rail and turned back. Their eyes met. “Yes, you have a strong mind. Stronger than you think. Are you coming?”

He stepped after her, focusing anew. Shutting down his uncertainties. Once bitter, now sweet. He had to remember that it was now sweet, or he might be tempted to think it was still bitter.

“What else?” she asked, walking down the steps.

Carl followed. “I can kill with almost anything. But I am first a sniper.”

“Not just a sniper. You can handle a rifle like no one in recorded history. Do you remember?”

Her voice echoed in the narrow cement stairwell. She unlocked a metal door at the base and pushed it open. It was cool down here. Damp but not wet. The musty smell of undisturbed earth filled his nostrils. He walked through the door into a long tunnel lit by a single caged incandescent bulb.

“It's okay,” she said, reaching back for him. “I've been here too.” He took her hand and walked beside her, deeper into the tunnel.

His fingers began to tremble, so he squeezed her hand tighter. She let him walk without speaking now. This journey to the pit was always a quiet one. Bittersweet, but sweet now. Lingering ghosts that had once been memories tried to haunt him, but he refused to succumb to their power.

They walked past two gray metal doors, one on the left and one on the right. The door on their right led to the training room, which featured a large sensory-deprivation tank that they'd used many times in his early training. When they lowered him into the warm salted water with headgear that masked his sight and hearing, he floated weightless without sensory perception, left only to the dark spaces of his mind. Terrible, beautiful, comforting, lost. But in the end he always found himself.

The other room had a small kitchen, a refrigerator, a shower, and a hard bunk without a mattress. When he wasn't in the pit, he slept and ate here.

The hall took a sharp right turn, then descended one more flight of stairs into the pit. They called it the pit, but it was really just a small, square concrete room with black walls. A single metal chair was bolted to the floor in the center of the room. There was a small metal door to an access tunnel at the back of the cell, but it was always locked. No other features.

No lights.

He paused at the open door, then stepped in, walked to the chair, and turned around.

Kelly stood by the door, staring at him. If he wasn't mistaken, she looked sad. She didn't like his being here. Why not? It was what he needed to succeed. And it wasn't nearly as bad as the hospital bed or the electricity.

They controlled the temperature of the room by heating or cooling the floor. He was forced to spend most of his time in the chair with his feet off the floor. The only way to survive the extended periods of time was to sleep sitting in extreme temperatures, something he could do only with considerable focus.

They monitored his vital signs with remote sensors.

“How long will I be here?”

“Two days.”

He slipped off his shoes. Tossed them to the floor by her feet. She picked them up by the laces and tossed them onto the steps behind her.

“And then more training?” he asked.

“Yes. I want you to forget everything that happened at the Andrassy.” He nodded. They stared at each other for a few seconds.

“Be strong, Carl. You have to make it. We're almost done. I'm so proud of you. You know that, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“They'll try to break you this last month. Promise me you won't break.”

“I won't break.”

“I think that you'll change the world. They have something very special in mind for you. All of this will soon make sense.”

“It already does,” he said. “Why are you helping me?”

Kelly walked into the room, put her right hand on his chest, and kissed him gently on the lips. “Maybe this will help you remember,” she said.

Then she walked out and shut the door behind her. An electronically triggered bolt slammed into place. Familiar silence settled. He couldn't hear her ascending the stairs.

Carl stood with one hand on the chair, staring at the blackness. It made no difference in here whether he had his eyes open or closed. The darkness was like a pool of black ink.

He stood without moving for a long time, at least an hour. The questions that had plagued him up in the light no longer mattered. He'd spent countless hours asking those questions and never received answers, only frayed emotions, which he could not afford.

The only way to survive for Kelly was to shut down.

The floor began to cool, and he knew it would soon be covered in ice. He climbed onto the chair and sat cross-legged.

It was time to enter the safe tunnel in his mind.

5

T
he president of the United States walked along the long book-case in his office at Camp David and ran a finger along the leather-bound titles. How many presidents before him had added volumes to this collection? It contained the expected law books, history books, countless classics. But it was the eclectic mix of fiction that intrigued him most.

Stephen King. Which president had taken the time to read Stephen King? Or had
The Stand
simply been placed on the book-shelf unread? Dean Koontz, John Grisham, James Patterson. A book called
This Present Darkness
by Frank Peretti. He had heard the name.

Behind him, Secretary of State Calvin Bromley cleared his throat. “I think it's a mistake to underestimate the polls, Mr. President. The country isn't where it was ten years ago.”

“Robert, Calvin. My name is Robert Stenton. If I've learned anything from my son, it's that even presidents have to be real.” He faced the two men seated in the overstuffed leather chairs flanking the coffee table. “I feel more like a real person when my friends use my given name in private.”

“And when will you feel the realness of being the leader of the free world?” David Abraham asked, stroking his white beard.

The president frowned, then cracked a grin. “Give me time. I've only been at this for a year.” He walked to the couch and sighed. “I know the polls are leaning toward the Iranian defense minister's proposal to disarm Israel, but I can't ignore the fact that it goes against every bit of good sense I've ever had.”

“Mr. Feroz's proposal makes some strategic sense,” Bromley said. “I'm not counseling you to throw in the towel, but more than a few nations are backing this initiative. I think the American people see what the rest of the world is seeing—a plausible scenario for real peace in the region. And you are the people's president.”

Robert looked at the secretary of state. Calvin Bromley, graduate of Harvard, two years his elder, but they'd known each other through the track-and-field program. The large Scandinavian man's blond hair was now graying, and he'd put on a good fifty pounds in the last thirty years, but his clear blue eyes glinted with the same determination that had served him so well throughout his career.

All three were Harvard men. David Abraham, retired professor of history and psychology who'd taught three of Stenton's undergraduate classes, now served as a confidant, a kind of spiritual adviser. The professor had experienced a spiritual renaissance later in life and had reconnected with Robert when Robert was the governor of Arizona.

The seventy-year-old mentor sat stoically, one leg crossed over the other. David had called this meeting. The weekend had originally been scheduled as a time to unwind, but when David suggested that the secretary of state come as well, Robert dismissed the hope of rest altogether.