CHAPTER FIVE
The man who called himself Mangouste stepped out the back door of his home and closed it behind him. The night was cool and moist, unseasonable for this part of California. He crossed the rear yard to a gate at the back, opened it, and stepped through into the forest beyond. Here the air was thicker still, the undergrowth looming out of a ground fog that had settled into the lowest parts of the wood.
There was a way through the brush—not quite a trail, but close enough. Mangouste followed it a hundred yards, to where it opened to a clearing fifty feet across.
In the center of the clearing was a place where the ground hummed with a vibration from below. He could only just feel it; a person who didn’t know better could walk over this spot a dozen times and not notice.
Mangouste moved in small steps until he found the place where the hum was strongest, then sat down there, on the damp leaves. He spoke under his breath in French and ran a hand through his hair. His fingertips passed over the faint remnant of a scar hidden there. He’d had it since childhood, more than thirty years back—the result of a brick swung by another child who had probably meant to kill him.
He had lived in France then, in Caen, eleven years old, long since orphaned. There were places for orphans in the city, but those places were worse than being alone on the street, so he had stayed away from them whenever possible. Being on your own was dangerous, of course, but danger could be adapted to. He had been homeless for nearly two years when the incident with the brick happened. He remembered it almost perfectly, even now—how quietly the attack had come, how nothing more than stupid luck had made him turn his head just then, taking a glancing blow instead of a dead-on impact. He recalled how instinctively he’d reacted. What it had felt like to put the blade of his knife into the other boy’s throat. How that strange moment had been intimate, in its own way: holding the boy down on top of the trash bags, pinning his arms and listening to him whimper as the blood came from his neck in hot little spurts. When the police found him there, an hour later, he was sitting with the dead boy’s hand in his lap, moving the digits one by one, mesmerized by the absence of life in them.
He had expected to go away to prison, but it didn’t happen that way. What happened was that he spent two days in a jail cell, and then in the middle of the night a policeman woke him up and took him out through the back door. The man put him into a van and drove him away; he rode for hours, lying on the backseat, truly afraid for the first time—he simply did not know what would happen to him at the end of the ride.
What happened was that he fell asleep in the van, and woke in a very comfortable bed in a room overlooking a resort town of some kind—a hillside full of enormous villas sweeping down to a lakefront. It turned out to be Lake Como in Italy. There was no sign of the policeman when he woke, but there were plenty of other people in the giant house—grown-ups and children, too. They were kind to him. They understood his mistrust and allowed him to come slowly out of his shell. They knew where he had come from, and how he had lived. They knew more than that, actually.
Your father was a soldier, they said. Did you know?
He nodded. Yes, he knew. It was just about all he knew of his parents—that one sentence.
Your father was a very good soldier. A loyal one, who helped us. You’re here because we owe it to him to look after you. This is your home now.
This had seemed too good to be the whole truth, and it hadn’t been. He had learned the rest of it in time: Yes, his father had done something for these people, but he himself would also be expected to do something for them, years down the road. He would be expected to do a great many things, as it would turn out. That was why they had taken him in.
But that was fine.
It was more than fine, in fact. By the time he understood the whole picture, he had come to agree with it. He had lived among those people for years by then, in their beautiful homes all over Europe, and their view of the world had persuaded him.
Some people call us a movement, they said, but that’s the wrong word. We’re something purer than that. We’re an idea—the most important idea in the world. We came very close to changing the world, once upon a time. What we want now is another chance to try.
Toward that end they were using all their power, which was considerable. They had what must have been billions of dollars. They had their own airliners, done up inside like yachts. They had powerful friends who visited sometimes and stayed up late into the night, sitting around the table, talking about what might have been, had things gone differently all those years ago. And talking about what might still be, somewhere down the road.