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Richards’s office, like all the underground spaces of the co puht felt recycled It was a little after two-thirty in the ot by on less than four hours of sleep a night, he had for years, so he paid this no mind On the wall above his station, three dozen time-stauards freezing their asses off at the front gate to the vacantdrink dispensers, to the subject contain, infectious cargo, and, farther down, through another fifty feet of rock, to the nuclear cells that powered it all and would keep the lights on, the juice flowing, for a hundred years, give or take a decade He liked having everything where he could see it at a glance, where he could read it like the cards So a delivery, and he figured he ht for that Subject processing took a couple of hours at the rab a feinks at his desk afterward if he had to

Then, on the coht there, under the six: the black queen he needed to move the jack and free up the two and so on A couple of clicks and it was over The cards shot up the screen like a pianist’s fingers flying over the keys

Do you want to play again?

You’re goddaaame ar, it alas, and asn’t there a war on, soood e run at the table with nothing but good news frohanistan, Iraq, Iran Syria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Chad The Philippines and Indonesia and Nicaragua and Peru

Richards re the planes slae 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 reht then; no, he’d felt it, right down to his bones A pure, unflinching rightness You had to give theto do of course, or they’d all just fking shoot each other But fros 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 Theods 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 mailht by youngten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subith vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anony 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 co down, after you’d boiled away the bullshit, to soot to sit where-but now the as everywhere,like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it

Which hy NOAH had made a certain sense, back when it all started Richard had been with the project since the beginning, since his first communique from Cole, rest in peace, you little shit He’d known it was so important when Cole actually ca at a table by a hen Cole strolled in, swinging a briefcase that probably had nothing in it but a cell phone and a diplo a Hawaiian shirt under his khaki suit, a nice touch, like sohed They ordered a pot of coffee and Cole got started, his smooth face aniia, but all those years at Andover and Princeton had tightened up thehi Robert E Lee The boy had nice-looking teeth, too, Ivy League teeth, straight as a fence and so white you could read by thean, think of the A-bo 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, youa 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 for truly long-term As in permanent

Which hy Cole had come to see him He needed somebody like Richards, he explained, someone off the books, but not only that Soht say Maybe not right away, but in the coathered to form the whole Security was paramount Security was at the absolute top of Cole’s list That’s why he had coet the buy-in To get this piece of the puzzle nailed down

All well and good if things had gone according to plan, which they hadn’t, not by a long shot, starting with the fact that Cole was dead A lot of people were dead, in fact, and some-well, it was hard to say just what they were Only three people had co, as already well on his way to beingwell, what? More than Cole had bargained for, that was for sure There ht have been more survivors, but the order from Special Weapons was clear: anybody who didn’t make it to the dust-off was bacon with a side of toast The missile that screamed in over the mountains had made sure of that Richards wondered what Cole would have said if he’d known he wouldn’t be one of the was safely locked away, Lear was on-site in Colorado, and everything that had happened in South America had been wiped from the system-Richards had learned what it was all about VSA, for Very Slow Aging Richards had to hand it to whoever had dreamed up that one VSA: Very Silly Abbreviation A virus or, rather, a family of viruses, hidden away in the world, in birds oron a dirty toilet seat somewhere A virus that could, with the proper refineland to its full and proper function Richards had read Lear’s early papers, the ones that had gotten Cole’s attention, the first one in Science and the second in Journal of Paleovirology, hypothesizing the existence of "an agent that could significantly lengthen human life span and increase physical robustness and has done so, at select hout huy to know that it was risky stuff: vah no one at Special Weapons ever used the word If it hadn’t been written by a scientist of Lear’s stature, a Harvard ist no less, it all would have sounded like so about it hit a nerve As a kid Richards had read his share of such stories, not just the comic books-Tales froinal Bram Stoker, and seen the movies too A bunch of silliness and bad sex, he knew that even then, and yet wasn’t there sonition, even of er, the is weren’t fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the huht under control?

That hat Lear had believed, and Cole too A belief that had taken the for a bunch of dead tourists A bunch of, as it had turned out, undead tourists-Richards disliked the word but couldn’t think of a better one, undeadness being, in the end, a pretty solid descriptor of the condition-who had killed-ripped apart, really-as left of the research tea, one of the soldiers, and a young graduate student na would have been a total loss

Lear: you had to feel for the guy Probably he still thought he was trying to save the world, but he’d sold that dreaotten into bed with Cole and Special Weapons And truth be told, it was hard to say what Lear was thinking these days; the guy never came off L4, slept down there in his lab on a sweaty little cot and took his meals off a hot plate He probably hadn’t seen the sun in a year Back at the start, Richards had done a little extra digging, and co Lear’s wife’s obituary in the Boston Globe-dated just six months before Cole had come to see him in Ankara, a full year before the Bolivia fiasco Elizabeth Macoo Professor of English at Boston College, associate editor of Renaissance Quarterly, author of Shakespeare’s Monsters: Bestial Transfore University Press, 2009) A long battle with lymphoma, et cetera There was a picture, too Richards wouldn’t have said Elizabeth Lear was a knockout, but she’d been pretty enough, in a slightly undernourished way A serious woman, with serious ideas At least there weren’t any kids involved Probably the chemo and radiation had ruled this out

So, really, when it carievingto undo his wife’s death?

Now, five years later and who kne many hundreds of millions down the rathole, all they had to show for their troubles were about three hundred dead s, half a dozen dead holowed in the dark and scared the shit out of absolutely everybody Like the monkeys, the first hu with fever, bleeding out like busted hydrants But then the first of the inmates, Babcock, had survived-Giles Babcock, as bullshit crazy a man as ever walked the earth; everyone on L4 called hiuy couldn’t shut up even for a second, not before and not after-followed by Morrison and Chavez and Baffes and the rest, each refineressively weaker, so the inmates’ bodies could combat it Eleven vaood to anyone, as far as Richards could tell Sykes had confessed that he wasn’t sure you could actually kill the an RPG down their throats VSA: Vampires, Say Aaaah The virus had turned their skin into a kind of protein-based exoskeleton, so hard it made Kevlar look like pancake batter Only over the breastbone, a strike zone about three inches square, was this h to penetrate But even that was just a theory

And the sticks were just crawling with virus Six o, a technician had been exposed; nobody could quite figure out how But oneonto his faceplate and seizing on the floor of the decon cha on the ht have happened As it was, all he’d had to do was purge the chaht the tech’s name was Samuels, or Samuelson It didn’t matter The scrubbers showed up clear of virus, and after a seventy-two-hour quarantine, Richards had unsealed the level

He didn’t wonder for a second that he’d pull the plug, if and when the time came The Elizabeth Protocol: Richards had to hand it to whoever had come up with the nah of course there was no doubt in Richards’s e Cole, you ht say, since Cole was Cole no more Beneath that smarmy country club exterior had always lain the heart of a true Machiavellian cutup Elizabeth, for Christsakes Only Cole would have actually nauy’s dead wife

Richards could feel it now; the whole thing was adrift Part of the problehtyto do but count rabbit skins and ask them to stay put and keep their mouths shut forever

And then there were the dreaht he did He never quite re strange had happened in the night, as if he’d taken an unplanned trip and only just returned That’s what had happened with the teeps who’d gone AWOL The castrati had been Richards’s idea, and for a time it had worked out nicely; you’d never meet a more docile bunch of fellows, a to otten out of the coe bins When Richards tracked the-holed up in a Red Roof by the interstate twenty ht-that’s all they could talk about, the drea their na berserk with it For a while he just sat on the edge of the bed and let theed sex offenders with skin soft as cash their noses on their hands, blubbering like kids It was touching in a way, but you could listen to soo, boys, Richards said, it’s all right, nobody’s mad at you, and he drove to a place he knew, a pretty spot with a view of a river, to show the, and shot them in the forehead