THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

For the record, I don't believe in this stuff.

No goddamn way.

There's possible, there's improbable, there's weird, and there's no-fucking-way. This is a mile or two past that. So, no, I don't believe in it.

What pisses me off is that it seems to believe in me.

THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
AUGUST 19, 11:41 A.M.

I was four minutes away from calling it a day and cutting out early to catch an Orioles-Padres game at Petco Park here in San Diego. Hot dogs loaded with everything that's bad for me, ice-cold beer in big red cups, and the opportunity to spend a few hours yelling at a bunch of young millionaires trying to hit a little ball with a big stick. Baseball, baby. The American pastime.

It was the first game I'd managed to catch since the craziness at Citizen's Bank Park last year. You know what I mean. The drone attacks on opening day. I'd spent a lot of the rest of the spring in hospitals. A bunch more time in rehab, then way too much sitting behind a desk doing paperwork and feeling my ass grow flat. Then I went back into the field and since then I've done nothing but run.

The Big Bad for us right now was ISIL. The press writes about them like they're a disorganized goon squad who are only a threat to the notoriously unstable governments in the Middle East. They're not. They're a whole lot scarier than that. Most of the people running them are former officers from Saddam's army. These are experienced soldiers who have been nurturing grudges. That was bad enough, but now they've upped their game and have put several special ops teams in the field. Real pros, too, and they managed to scoop up leftover Kingsmen from the ruins of the Seven Kings organization. Was it weird that ISIL was using shooters who were not Muslims? Yup. Very weird. And very scary, too, because it allowed them to come at us in unpredictable ways. A bunch of their SpecOps fighters were Americans, so even with the heightened security and paranoia here in the States following the drone stuff, we were feeling some rabbit punches from them. Attacks on power grids, an attempted sabotage of a nuclear power plant. Like that.

And our super-duper computer system, MindReader, has been picking up some hints about a really big attack planned for the US of A, and if the rumors were true then it was going to involve some kind of electromagnetic pulse weapon.

So, yeah ... bad guys. Really scary bad guys, and they were causing a whole lot of very serious trouble. We had DMS teams running joint ops with the CIA and Homeland, with Barrier in the UK, with Mossad in Israel, and with a dozen other special operations crews.

Overall, I was busier than a three-headed cat in a dairy. That's not to say I spent all of my time in the field kicking terrorist ass. Mind you, I'm still a gunslinger for Uncle Sam, but now that I run the Special Projects Office I'm also management, which sucks six kinds of ass.

Baseball kept calling to me, though, and today was the first time I could reasonably justify leaving the shop early to have some actual fun.

The phone began ringing while I was tidying my desk.

If you work in a bank, an insurance company, or pretty much most jobs, you can pretend you don't hear that call. I know cops at the ragged end of a long shift who swear their radios were malfunctioning.

But when you do what I do, you have to drop everything else — your time off, your family, your friends, even baseball — and you take the call. Kind of like the Bat-Signal. You can't just blow it off.

So I answered the call.

It was my boss, Mr. Church.

"Captain Ledger," he said, "I need you on the next thing smoking. Dress warm, it's going to be cold."

I looked out the window. This was August and the Southern California summer was cooking. Temperature was eighty-eight in the shade. I was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt with surfing pelicans on it.

"How cold?" I asked.

"This morning it was minus fifty-eight."

I closed my eyes.

"I hate you," I said.

"I'll manage to live with your contempt."

"Okay," I said, "tell me."

INTERLUDE ONE

OFFICE OF DR. MICHAEL GREENE
EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK
WHEN PROSPERO WAS ELEVEN

"Are you going to talk today?" asked the psychiatrist. "Or are you still mad at me?"

The boy sat in the exact middle of the couch even though it was not the most comfortable place. He was like that, preferring precision over comfort. It was reflected in the number of pieces of food he would allow on his dinner plate, the number of tissues he would use no matter how many times he sneezed. Numbers mattered in ways that Dr. Greene was still discovering. So far the psychiatrist had been able to determine that Prospero Bell believed that math, in all its forms, was not merely a way to calculate sums, but was in fact tied to the very structure of physical reality. He'd even made himself a hand-drawn T-shirt last year that had a quote from mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss: "God arithmetizes," itself a variation of a quote Plutarch famously attributed to Plato: "God geometrizes continually."

Prospero was very tall for his age, but thin as a stick. As he perched on the couch, his long body seemed to be temporarily suspended, as if he was about to slide down between the two big leather cushions but chose not to fall. Always awkward and always strange, and he did not seem to ever fit into the world as it was. Dr. Greene knew that this reflected the boy's inner life. After four years of therapy, the doctor was quite convinced that this boy lived in two entirely separate worlds. The one inside, where Prospero clearly felt he belonged, and the one outside that he loathed and resented. That discomfort, and the resulting disconnect from ordinary social interactions, was the basis of their frequent sessions.

"I never said I was mad at you," said the boy. He was eleven and his voice was beginning to deepen. No cracks or squeaks, just a timbre that hinted at the baritone to come.

"You threw an apple at me last Thursday," said Greene.

"It was handy."

"That's not my point."

Prospero gave him a microsecond of a sly grin. "I know."

"Then —"

"I didn't want to talk about my father anymore and you wouldn't shut up. I didn't hit you with the apple."

"You tried. I ducked."

"No," said Prospero, "I missed. The fact that you ducked says more about you than my 'missing' says about my aim. I wanted to miss. You didn't want to duck, but you did anyway because you didn't know that I wouldn't have hit you."

Today the boy wore a green cloth jacket that he had systematically covered with symbols from cabalism, magic, and alchemy. Greene knew this because there had been three full sessions about those designs. Now there was a gray hoodie under the jacket, the top pulled up to throw shadows down over Prospero's thin, ascetic face. The boy had painstakingly drawn an elaborate and technically excellent monster on the hood. The thing had a bulbous, flabby body, stubby wings, and a beard made from writhing tentacles that trailed from the gray hood onto the green material of the jacket.

Greene met with Prospero three times a week, down from the five talks per week that marked the boy's most extreme phases, up from the twice weekly of last...