“Then what?” Stenton demanded. “For that matter, what are
they
doing?”
“I think they're getting down to the truth of the matter,” David said. He headed for the door. “I'm going out there.”
“Davidâ”
“I'm going. The rest of you stay here.”
I
f the power came from a benevolent God, wouldn't he hand out more of it so that mortals could rid the world of nasty men like me?” Englishman asked.
Johnny was remembering now. Dogma embraced during his tenure as a chaplain flooded his mind. “Because I'm an exception, just like Samson was an exception. But you're right, I am going to rid the world of you.”
Englishman didn't speak for a long time. The world was a charcoal gray, highlighted by bright edges. It was clear to Johnny that his coming out to meet Englishman without a plan would end badly. He was facing off like the local sheriff while thinking about how to make it back into the hills in one piece. At least he was stalling the attack on the ranch house. In this way he was fulfilling his mission.
In every other way he was lost. And going blind.
Englishman's shoulders suddenly relaxed. He crossed his arms. Johnny heard a smile in his voice. “Well, well, well. You've gone and done it. Congratulations, Carl. Your training is complete. You've done wellâfar better than we had hoped.” Englishman walked toward him.
“Stop.”
He lowered his arms, totally relaxed now. “I realize you may be confused about this. I was too. But it's over. You've just completed your final test. We've reintegrated you into your own history, most of which is true.”
“What do you mean,
integrated
? That's a lie. I'm Johnny.”
“You are. And you were a chaplain as well. And you did volunteer for X Group. And now you are Saint. All of it's true. The continuing story of Project Showdown, on the other hand, is a fabrication. It's Agotha's version of a crutch. Like religion. It gave you a reason to believe that you could move mountains and rocks. You were hitting a wall in Hungary, so we set this up for you.”
Englishman spread both hands, indicating the valley. “This, my friend, is
you
, not God. It's all you and me. I'm the only other person who's succeeded in manipulating the zero-point field.”
“I don't believe you.” Johnny was feeling nauseated. The world was black, like his pit, and maybe that was good. Maybe he did belong in the blackness of a pit, only surviving to kill.
“I denied it too,” Englishman said. “I stood right here and screamed my bloody head off. It took me a week before I could move another rock, and only then when I finally realized that I had done it with my own power, not with some power from the sky.”
Englishman tapped his head. “It's up here, Carl. A simple matter of quantum physics. The zero-point field. And believe me, you've done well. Statistically, fewer than one in ten million humans have the mental strength to pull off what you have, and only then with considerable training. Gurus and such.”
Johnny stared at Englishman, stunned by the possibility, however thin, that he was hearing the truth. But even then, he knew it had to be a trick. It had to be! He'd lost himself in their lies once, a hundred times. He couldn't accept them this time.
“You're wrong. I've finally discovered who I am, and it begins with Project Showdown. Now you have the gall to think I'd just throw it all out for the same lies Agotha fed me for a year? What do you take me for?”
“Please, Johnny. If you insist, we can resort to drug therapy.”
“Kelly knows the truth. This is crazy!”
“Kelly is the same person today that she was a month ago! A woman willing to betray you for your own sake. She does love you, but she's under no delusion that this exercise is anything more than a very carefully executed hoax to help you believe in yourself. Believe, for crying out loud! Believe, but believe in yourself, not some faceless god!”
“I
can't
believe in myself.”
“You can. As of this moment, you can. You're finally understanding who you really are. You are Johnny. You love Kelly and Kelly loves you. You did not kill the president because we didn't want you to. You did kill Feroz because you were meant to. You were put into the most inhumane pressure cooker of a test to draw out your strength, and it has succeeded. Everything else is a sham! Everything! Even your mother. It wasn't Sally you met. She was one of ours.”
The claim blindsided Johnny. “That's impossible. I . . . I felt her love.”
“You felt what we wanted you to feel,” Englishman said. “The woman you wept over in Paradise was not your mother. We stashed Mommy away in a safe house the day after you bolted from New York. It was all a lie to bring you to the point you've finally come to.” Englishman nodded at the floating stones. “And it was well worth it, don't you think?”
Johnny's head swam in confusion. He simply couldn't accept that Sally wasn't his mother. Reuniting with her was the beginning of his awakening. If she was a lie, then the rest was a sham.
Or was it? He refused to let down his guard. The woman he'd embraced in Paradise
was
his mother!
“Samuel,” he said. “David Abraham . . .”
“Unwitting accomplices we used because of their connection to you. It was all a setup, beginning with Samuel's vision, which was nothing more than a simple case of strong suggestion in a drug-induced state, followed up by numerous uncanny confirmations. It was
our
vision, and we made sure it came to pass. Does Samuel have any powers? I don't think so. He's a thirteen-year-old boy who knows only what we've wanted him to know.”
This was incredible. “What about his age?”
“So he has a growth issue connected to Project Showdown. So what? That doesn't change the fact that we pulled his strings all along.”
“David Abraham?”
“Fed off of Samuel's vision.”
“The president. You're saying that evenâ”
“No. You shot him, remember? But it wasn't your bullet that struck the president. It was mine, and I was much closer. I have the power to affect a bullet's path. I did. Your bullet went where our scope told it to go, far over his head. Not that you couldn't have pulled off the hit, but we didn't want a dead president on our hands. At some point we will retrace every last detail and explain it for you. Trust me, it all fits like a glove.”
Johnny's worlds were colliding. Did Englishman know about his eyesight? Was that also part of the deception?
There was a sound of hard rain behind Englishman. Johnny's stones, falling to the sand. He didn't mean for them to fall; they just did.
He had supposedly passed the greatest test of all time and felt only desperation. Neither the anger nor the righteousness he would expect to feel at this moment.
“You,” Johnny said. “You don't fit.”
Englishman smiled. “I fit perfectly. I'm the only person on the globe who has the power you have. I know your pain. Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it can't bear fruit, isn't that the truth? We've been destroyed so that we can live, and frankly I hate that. But there it is.”
“Why?” Johnny asked. “Why did you do this to me?”
“Look around. You just moved a mountain! You tested off the charts on your military entrance exams and were noticed. Then followed for three years before it was determined that you'd make a good candidate. Now you've proven them right. And to prove it to me, there's one last thing I need you to do.”
“What?”
“Kill the president.”
Outrage flooded Johnny, then ebbed. He swallowed. “I thought you didn't want him dead.”
“Not until after you'd killed Feroz. With Feroz and the president out of the way, the Iranian initiative can move forward without the threat of two idealists duking it out.”
“No.” He clenched his fists. The stones behind Englishman sprang back into the air. Courage filled his chest. Englishman was lying.
“I don't believe you. You're here to kill me. Samuel and David have told me the truth. Sally is my mother. You're taking me for a fool!”
Englishman took a long time in answering. “Then you are a fool, Carl. And in this business, all fools die. You decide today: either you believe me when I say you were deceived in Paradise, or you believe them that I'm lying. One way you kill the president and live, the other you die.”
“I found the truth in Paradise. I embraced my mother.”
For a moment Englishman just stared at him. A loud wrench of tearing metal split the air. Thirty yards behind Englishman, the trunk hatch on the Honda Accord flew to the sky.
A large object tumbled from the trunk and rolled toward them. As if manipulated by unseen hands, it was jerked upright not fifteen yards off. Johnny saw then that it was a body.
A woman. With long hair and wide eyes, bound with rope and silenced with gray duct tape. His heart hammered.
“One wrong move and she dies,” Englishman said. “Is this the woman you embraced in Paradise? No, I don't think so. Say hello to Mommy.”
The tape ripped from her face. She screamed, terrified. “Johnny?”
This was not the woman he'd embraced in Paradise. Johnny began to tremble from the bottom of his feet to the base of his head.
“Johnny,” the woman whimpered.
The sound of her voice haunted him.
Are you my mother?
“Mother?”
“Johnny, what have they done to you?”
He knew then that this woman was his mother. And he felt powerless to move.
“The woman you found in Paradise was an operative. A rather brilliant operative, as you can attest. We orchestrated it all, Johnny.” “Let her go,” he said. Emotion choked him. “Just let her go!”
“You are like me, Johnny. You're a pretender who doesn't believe in what he's pretending anymore. You're a child of illusion who's been fed dogma and doctrine as a form of manipulation.”
Johnny had been here before, on the barely surviving end of a hundred less-distorting games. What was one more?
“Will you?” Englishman asked.
The question echoed through Johnny's skull.
Will you?
He tried to focus on Englishman and was struck again by the darkness. Maybe his blindness was psychosomatic and would soon end.
“How?” he heard himself asking.
“Just walk in and kill him. You're their hero. They won't question your return, particularly if I've given a show of surrender.”
From the beginning this had been their intention. To break him as he'd never been broken before and to kill both Feroz and the president at the same time. This was the mission he'd been so carefully trained for.
He exhaled slowly to calm himself. The familiar resolve that had been his friend in so many tests lapped at his mind. There was comfort there, in the dark tunnel where he was safe by himself.
“Johnny!” David Abraham stepped out from behind a large boulder and marched straight toward them. “Don't listen to his lies, Johnny.”
“The old fool has come out to die.” Englishman rolled his eyes.
“Is she my mother?” Johnny asked.
David stopped twenty yards from them and glanced at Sally. “I thought you met her in Paradise.”
David knew Sally from before. And this was her. “Not her,” Johnny said.
David's eyes widened slightly.
“Game over, old man,” Englishman said. “We have all firmly in hand. Your presence is no longer required.”
“Samuel told me about your eyes, Johnny,” David said. “They show the truth. The truth will set youâ”
Before David could finish, a hole blew through his shirt. He gasped and stared at a growing stain of red blood over his left breast pocket. Englishman had sent a pebble through the old man.
Johnny spun back to Englishman as David Abraham fell to the ground.
“One wrong move and she dies too,” Englishman said.
“Stop it!” Johnny screamed. It sounded silly, but he felt so over-whelmed that nothing else came to mind. So he yelled it again. “Just stop it!”
“Only you can stop it. Kill the president, Johnny.”
David's last words still rang in his ears. His eyes. There was something about his eyes . . .
His mother stood shaking, hands tied tightly behind her. She was crying now, begging him to do something. He saw her more in shades of light and shadows than in full color, but oddly enough, this way of seeing didn't compromise his ability to understand exactly what he was looking at.
“Trust David, Johnny,” she said. “Use your eyes.”
THIS MATTER of the eyes again,
Englishman thought. He didn't care for the black stare. He preferred looking a man in the eyes before killing him.
Oh yes, he was indeed going to kill Johnny. As soon as Johnny killed the president. That was the deal, the new deal, the deal he should have made long ago.
Johnny looked at him dumblyâthose shiny, silver-coated glasses made him look like an alien. They bothered Englishman immensely.
“My eyes?”
“Enough with the eyes crap, Johnny,” Englishman said. “Either you kill the president, or I do the lot of you. This is growing old.”
“I think something might be wrong with my eyes,” Johnny said. “I thought I was going blind. But it's stopped now.”
Blind? He wasn't sure why the idea of blindness sent a shaft of fear through his chest, but he knew about opposites. He knew that when darkness encroached, the light was often just over the horizon.
“I see glimmers of light on the edge of everything. Otherwise it's dark,” Johnny said.
“Enough!”
“David told me to show you the truth.” Johnny reached up and lifted the sunglasses from his face. “Do you know what he meant?”
Englishman's nerves stretched to the snapping point when he saw Johnny's eyes. Behind him, the mother gasped. Johnny didn't have eyes in the common understanding of the word. No blue or brown or green irises with black dots dead-center.