The two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-table black tie dinner. The Aberdeen Angus beef and pink champagne jelly. Yet another gathering of the planet’s rich and famous, the powerful elite who aspired to solve the world’s big crises. Insecure egotists and well-meaning philanthropists, getting together not just to assuage their guilt by handing over some money to help a thousand or two poorer souls, but hoping to trigger change that could save the lives of millions.
Rydell and Drucker had sat together, late into the night, going over the growing mountain of data on global warming. Fourteen thousand new cars a day hitting the road in China. The booming industries there and in India building new coal-fired electricity plants every week. The developed world embracing cheap, coal-burning energy more than ever. Congress giving the oil and gas companies back home one tax break after another. The energy companies’ disinformation campaigns helping people duck the issue and avoid making hard choices. Every new study confirming that if things looked bad, they were actually far worse.
They were both in agreement: The planet was hurtling toward the point of no return. We were living a defining moment, the defining moment for our continued existence on this planet, and we were ignoring it.
The question was, what to do about it.
Throughout, Drucker couldn’t escape the feeling that Rydell was testing him, sounding him out. Seeing how far he’d go.
Drucker smiled inwardly as he remembered how Rydell had finally let it out.
Drucker had said, “All this,” gesturing at the lavish setting around them, “it’s something, but it won’t change much. Governments, big business . . . no one wants to upset the apple cart. Voters and share options, they’re the only things that matter. Growth. People don’t really want change, especially not if it costs something. The price of oil has quadrupled so far this century, and nothing’s changed. No one cares. The ‘don’t worry, be happy, it’s all a load of crap’ message the fuel lobby keeps pumping out—deep down, that’s what everyone wants to hear. It’s heaven-sent.”
“Maybe heaven should send them a different message,” Rydell had replied, a knowing—and visionary—blaze in his eye.
The rest had followed on from that.
At first, it had seemed Rydell was talking theory. But the theoretical soon became the possible. The possible became the doable. And when that happened, everything changed.
As far as Drucker was concerned, a whole host of possible uses were on the table. What Rydell and his people had come up with could be used as a weapon that could tackle any number of threats in different, and potentially spectacularly effective, ways. Problem was, Rydell wouldn’t be open to that. As far as he was concerned, there was only one major threat facing us.
Drucker disagreed.
There were others. Threats that were far more immediate, far more dangerous. Threats that required more immediate attention. For although Drucker was a concerned citizen of the world, he was, more than anything, a patriot.
The Muslim world was growing bolder and wilder. It needed reining in. Drucker didn’t think they’d ever be able to convert that part of the world, to pull its people away from their religion. But there were other ways of using Rydell’s technology there. One idea he’d toyed with was using it to foment an all-out war between Sunnis and Shias. China was also a growing concern. Not militarily, but economically. Which was even worse. A spiritual message could have shifted things there. And there were other concerns that troubled Drucker even more. Concerns that were closer to home. Concerns about threats that had cost his only son his life. In any case, using the global warming message as the first hook was the way to go. It was nonthreatening. It was a cause that everyone could embrace, one that transcended race and religion. It would help bring people on board from day one. The secondary message—the one that counted—would sneak in through the back door.
The strategy had to be carefully conceived. He had a head start, given the makeup of the country. Seventy percent of Americans believed in angels, in heaven, in life after death—and in miracles. Even better, fully 92 percent of Americans believed in a personal God, someone who took interest in their individual dramas and whom they could ask for help. The foundation was solidly there. Drucker had also drawn from the work of highly respected psychologists and anthropologists who studied the mental architecture of religious belief. What he was planning had to sit within the parameters such research had laid out. For one, the deception had to be minimally counterintuitive. It needed to be strange enough to capture people’s attention and root itself firmly in their memory, but not too strange, so they wouldn’t dismiss it. Studies had shown that convincing religious agents had to have just the right level of outlandishness. Also, the manifestation needed to have an emotional resonance in order for belief to set in. Religions used elaborate rituals to stir up people’s emotions: soaring, dark cathedrals filled with candlelight, hymns and chants, bowing in unison. In that context, the environmental movement taking on a quasi-religious aspect was the perfect platform. It wasn’t just us coming face-to-face with our mortality—it was the entire planet.
The timing was also helpful. The planet was living through scary times on many fronts. The environment. Economic meltdown. Terrorism and rogue nukes. Avian flu. Nanotechnology. Hadron colliders. Everything seemed to be out of control or have the potential to wipe us out. Our very existence seemed threatened on a daily basis. Which could only feed into the prophecies of some kind of savior, a messiah showing up to sort everything out and bring about a millennial kingdom. And it wasn’t just a Christian phenomenon. Every major religion had its own version of how a great teacher would appear and rescue the world from catastrophe. For Drucker, however, only one of them mattered.
Ultimately, though, he kept coming back to one main stumbling block: the notion that at some point, something would go wrong. They wouldn’t be able to fool all of the people all of the time. Someone would let something slip. The technology would leak out. Something was bound to screw up. Which was why he’d decided to embrace that fallibility and use it as the starting point of his strategy.
It proved to be an inspirational masterstroke.
Everything was in place. He’d recruited the right partners to help him pull it off. He just needed to wait for the right event, something big, something with enough emotional resonance. He knew that, sooner or later, it would come. The planet was roiling, writhing in anger. More and more natural catastrophes were taking place all around the globe. And the one he got came as if gifted by the gods themselves. The best part of it all was the role the media would play. They’d buy into the deception without hesitation. It was visceral, it was huge, and—in its crucial launch phase, anyway—it was about saving the planet, an issue that was dear to their hearts.
Drucker’s phone trilled. He glanced at its screen. The Bullet’s name flashed up. The enabler. The man whose foot soldiers were making it all happen. The charred, deformed marine who was Jackson’s commanding officer. The man who’d left half his face in the same Iraqi slaughterhouse that had ripped Drucker’s son to shreds.
Drucker picked up the phone.
The news wasn’t good.
Chapter 58
Brookline, Massachusetts
The hydraulic compactor whined as it swiveled upward. Almost instantly, a sour stench wafted out of the truck’s belly, even though the truck wasn’t actually carrying any garbage. Matt let the compactor
