4. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 92-163

I. The Worst Dream in the World, 5-1 B.V., Six-Ten

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[I'm going to try to keep these summaries shorter -- to stick to the plot and not get too involved in the details that give the story texture.] 

Lacey, who has overslept, decides to skip Mass and take Amy to the zoo. Sister Claire, a novitiate who joined the order after a bad marriage, agrees to cover for her. At the zoo, Amy asks to see the polar bears, but she seems to have a strange rapport with the creatures, all four of whom gather in front of her at the window that separates them from the crowd, causing water to splash over the barrier and threatening to break the glass. To Lacey, a sorrowful Amy says that the polar bears know "What I am."

At the convent, Sister Arnette has returned to find Lacey and Amy gone, and Sister Claire confesses that they went to the zoo. Arnette is concerned because she knows the real story about Lacey, whose family had been killed in the civil war. Lacey had been found by UN workers after being assaulted and left for dead. In Arnette's view Lacey "might just as well have been dead, if God hadn't protected her by washing her mind of these events." As Arnette is about to call the police, Wolgast and Doyle arrive, claiming "that Amy is a federal witness" and that they are there to "place her under protection." But while they are talking, the police call to tell Arnette that there is a disturbance at the zoo and it seems to center on a black nun with a little girl.

At the zoo all the animals seem to have gone mad, terrifying the crowds. Lacey feels the presence of a "dark man" who was coming for Amy, and the thought links in her mind with her ordeal in Sierra Leone. She picks up Amy and runs for the exit, but in the parking lot she freezes when she hears a gunshot. Claire and Arnette arrive in the van the nuns drive, followed by Wolgast and Doyle in a black sedan. Arnette grabs Amy and hands her to the FBI men, who drive away with her as Lacey collapses, filled with visions of her night in the field in Sierra Leone as well as an apocalyptic vision of the future.

Carter is on his way to the facility in Colorado, riding in a van with two soldiers, Paulson and Davis. After what seems like initial kindness, Paulson begins to mock Carter as "retarded," although Davis tries to make him stop. Paulson also says that Carter must have raped Rachel Wood, which makes Carter feel sick.

Wolgast and Doyle are making their way out of Memphis with Amy. Wolgast is increasingly upset with what they're doing, now that he's seen Amy. Realizing that there were witnesses to Amy's abduction, he checks in with Sykes and trades their sedan for a Chevy Tahoe. 

Richards meets Carter, still in the custody of Paulson and Davis, at the compound. Sensing what has gone on between Carter and the soldiers, and eager to gain Carter's trust, he draws his gun and threatens to shoot Paulson, making Carter feel better even after Richards admits he wouldn't really have shot the soldier.

Wolgast and Doyle are in Oklahoma after making a stop to pick up cash that Sykes had delivered to them. Wolgast declined the new car that was provided as well, choosing to keep the Tahoe. He also declined the bag of weapons and bulletproof vests that were in the trunk of the car. Amy has remained quiet, but Wolgast senses that she's only pretending to sleep. When Amy declares that she needs to go to the bathroom, she insists that Wolgast, not Doyle, accompany her. Now that she's beginning to open up a little, Wolgast tries to reassure her that she shouldn't be afraid. She says she isn't: "You are."

In a small town called Homer, they find a carnival taking place. Wolgast suggests that they take a break there and take Amy on some rides. Doyle reluctantly agrees, but points out that two men in suits with a little girl would attract suspicion, so they change into jeans and sport shirts and go separate ways, Amy staying with Wolgast. She wants to go on the Octopus, and when the ride ends wants to go again.

Wolgast looked down at Amy's face; still that neutral, appraising gaze, yet he detected, behind the darkness of her eyes, a warm light of happiness. A new feeling opened inside him; no one had ever given her such a present.

After riding the Octopus three more times and eating a hot dog, funnel cake and milk, Amy wants to go on the carousel. Wolgast is so taken with playing Amy's father that he thinks, "Lila, this was what I wanted. Did you know? It's all I ever wanted." He sees Doyle flirting with a woman and suddenly makes a plan to escape from everything, to run away with Amy. He tries it, but Doyle catches up with them. Wolgast realizes that Doyle has anticipated this attempt, and when Wolgast starts to plead with his partner, Doyle says, "not menacing, merely stating the facts. 'Don't even say the words. We're partners, Brad. It's time to go.'" But neither of them see that they're being watched by an off-duty state trooper who has seen a report about two men kidnapping a girl at the Memphis zoo.

Grey is hearing a voice that keeps saying: "I was called Fanning." He has slept through his morning shift and is not due to work again until 10 p.m. He has dinner at the commissary and is finishing his meal when Paulson comes up to his table and starts to bully him, wanting Grey to tell him about Level Four. Grey insists that he's just a janitor, but Paulson persists. He asks if Grey dreams, and says, "Well, I sure as hell dream. All goddamn night long. One after the other. I am dreaming some crazy shit.... I dream about you." Then he tells Grey that Jack and Sam are dead. "We're all dead."

Carter has been sedated and had something put in the back of his neck, and now remembers someone pushing the button L4 in the elevator. He is afraid that he is being executed after all. He remembers Wolgast telling him, "I can give you all the time in the world, Anthony. An ocean of time." And he recalls how Rachel Wood had stopped at the traffic light where he was begging with his sign, rolled down the window and fumbled with her purse trying to find some money to give him. The light changed and people began to honk while she continued to look through her purse. A man got out of one of the backed-up cars, carrying a gun, accusing Carter of carjacking. Panicked, Rachel opened the passenger door and let Carter in. In the car, she told him that what attracted her about his sign was the words "God bless you," because she didn't feel blessed.

He went to work for her and for her friends, but after an initial period of feeling that she had done something good for someone else, her depression worsened. One December day, Carter found her daughter Haley, a kindergartner, locked outside on the patio. "Daddy's in Mexico, the girl stated, and shivered in the cold. With his girlfriend. Her mama wouldn't get out of bed." He tried the doors and gave the girl his sweater, then found  a tiny toad in the garden and brought it to show the girl just as Rachel came out of the house and screamed at him to get away from Haley, then shoved him. He tripped over the pool skimmer and, instinctively reaching out for something to grab onto, pulled her into the pool with him. He was unable to swim, and she kept pulling him down until she drowned and released him. He decided, "It was a secret she had given him, the final secret of who she was, and he was meant to keep it."

He becomes aware that there is a figure in the doorway and decides, "All right. I'm ready. Let them come."

Richards meets with Sykes to discuss the "situation":  Amy's mother is a suspect in the shooting of the son of a federal circuit court judge after the gun she left at the scene led police to the motel whose manager ID'd Amy from the photographs taken of her at the convent. Wolgast and Doyle had been identified from the surveillance video at the Mississippi checkpoint, and an Amber Alert had been issued. "Just like that, the whole world was looking for two federal agents and a little girl named Amy Bellafonte." Sykes has ordered a helicopter to intercept Wolgast and Doyle, and as Richards boards it, Sykes warns him, "'She's a kid! ... Do this right!' Whatever that meant, Richards thought."

In the Tahoe, Doyle tells Wolgast, "Richards thought you might have problems with this." Wolgast warns Doyle to be careful of Richards: "Private security contractor. He's little more than a mercenary." When they stop for gas, Doyle reaches over and takes the keys and removes the clip from the gun Wolgast keeps in the glove box. Three state police cruisers race past on the highway, and Wolgast and Doyle realize that they're being looked for.

Sister Arnette is unable to sleep after all the events of the day, including Lacey's unwillingness to identify Wolgast, when shown his photograph, as Amy's abductor: "Do you see? He loves her." Arnette was forced to tell the detective and the other nuns about what had happened to Lacey in Sierra Leone, and Sister Claire called it post-traumatic stress disorder. Arnette dozes off and then wakes in a panic: "Some dark force had come loose in the world, and it was sweeping toward them, coming for them all." She runs to Lacey's room and finds it locked. Her pounding on the door wakes the other nuns, and when Claire pulls her away from the door they see that Arnette's palms are bleeding. Claire rationally points out that Arnette has dug her fingernails into her palms. When they get the door open, they find that Lacey has gone.

Grey is still unsettled by the encounter with Paulson when he reports for duty. And then Richards gets on the elevator with him and tells him he's been docked twelve hundred dollars -- the pay for two shifts -- for failing to show up that morning. Grey notices the signs warning that anyone with symptoms including vomiting, fever, disorientation and seizures should report them immediately. After checking in with Davis, who is working security, he goes to L4, where he meets two other sweeps, Jude and Ignacio, and sees that his duties are to mop, empty trash and watch Zero to see if he is eating. A tech named Pujol comes to see about Zero, and Grey tells him that he's still not eating. He asks Pujol why, when the subjects are given ten rabbits, they only eat nine of them. Pujol suggests they're saving it for later. Grey wants to ask why they are fed rabbits, and how Zero can stick to the ceiling, but doesn't.

Then, after Pujol has gone, Grey starts to doze off and is wakened by a voice "in his head, almost like something he was reading: the words were someone else's, but the voice was his own." It calls his name and says "Look at me." Grey looks at the image of Zero on the monitor. "I was called Fanning," it says, and then asks Grey to take him home. Grey's head is filled with visions of a city, then of a college campus and the young women on it. The voice also tantalizes him with images of the boy Grey molested and then of a girl alone and afraid on the college campus.

Grey vomits, then makes a panicked attempt to clean it up. He takes the elevator to L3, where Davis is reading a porno magazine. Davis panics when Grey tells him he isn't feeling well: The level would have to be quarantined and both of them would be stuck there. So Davis lets Grey take the elevator.

[Cronin takes a turn deeper into the paranormal -- as if swarms of man-eating bats and viruses that turn people into vampires weren't paranormal enough -- with Amy's effect on the zoo animals, the psychic connection with Wolgast, and the ability of Zero/Fanning to invade people's dreams. He handles it well, I think, because the groundwork he has laid for his novel in conventional psychology and physiology now enables him to skew off in another direction. And he has hinted at where he's going: Carter's reference on p. 48 to The X-Files, for example.  

One of the more impressive things about Cronin's narrative is his ability to juggle so many points of view and to individualize his characters. He empathizes with his characters, so that he's able to keep even the minutiae of their inner lives consistent. For example, when Paulson and Davis release Carter from his shackles, "Carter couldn't remember when he'd gone anywhere without somebody's hand on him someplace." This is consistent with an observation about Carter some eighty pages earlier, when he's in prison: "Part of you got used to people's hands being on you this way, and part of you didn't."

Cronin is also good at weaving connections between his characters. When Lacey is being raped in the field in Sierra Leone, "she had sent her mind away from her body, up and up through the branches to heaven, where God was, and the girl in the field was someone else." This echoes Jeanette's ability to see the prostitute, the Jeanette "who stood on the highway in her stretch top and skirt" as "a made-up person, like a woman in a story she wasn't sure she wanted to know the end of." And since the night in the field, Lacey has been hearing voices -- "Lacey Antoinette Kudoto. Listen. Look." -- that are eerily (and probably significantly) similar to the voice of Zero/Fanning in Grey's head.] 

3. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 55-92

I. The Worst Dream in the World, 5-1 B.V., Four-Five

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Lacey Antoinette Kudoto, the nun with whom Jeanette left Amy, believes that she hears the voice of God and that it's telling her something about Amy. Jeanette has left a note in Amy's backpack: "I'm sorry. Her name is Amy. She's six years old." Amy "had a way of neither looking nor speaking, of being alone with herself even in the presence of another person, that Lacey had never encountered. ... When the girl did this, it was as if she, Lacey, were the one who vanished." She tries to get the child to open up to her by playing a game of telling secrets: Lacey's is that once as a child she ran away from home but came back before anyone knew she was gone. But the only secret Lacey can elicit from Amy is, "I don't think she's coming back."

Lacey calls the police to report the abandoned child, but they suggest that since the weekend is coming up she keep Amy with her. They'll report the incident, put out a description of Jeanette, and enter Amy in the database of missing children. They can call Child Protection if she wants, but Lacey decides she'll do it herself. She is alone at the convent, having stayed there because she was getting over a cold, while the other sisters worked at the Community Pantry. When they return, Lacey lies about Amy, telling them that she was watching the girl for a friend who has gone to visit a sick relative in Arkansas. Sister Arnette, who seems to be in charge of things, disapproves but agrees that Amy can stay in their spare room until Monday. The other nuns are more welcoming, and go to buy food, clothes and toys for the girl.

When she gets ready for bed, Amy asks if she has to sleep in the bathroom, which puzzles Lacey. That night, Lacey dreams that she is a girl again in Sierra Leone and that she is hiding from "men who sounded like soldiers but weren't dressed like soldiers, who swept the ground before them with the barrels of their rifles." Just as one of the men is about to discover her, she wakes up in terror. She is startled to find Amy standing in the doorway. The girl says nothing, but Lacey takes her into her bed. "Her body was giving off waves of heat -- not a fever, but nothing ordinary, either. She was glowing like a coal." Amy tells her that she wants to stay, but Lacey realizes that she is going to have to tell Sister Arnette the truth: "by lying about Amy, she had wrapped their fates together.

Then Amy says, "I won't tell anyone. Don't let them take me away." But when Lacey asks who, Amy is silent. Lacey spends the rest of the night wide awake.

Wolgast and Doyle are on the road in Louisiana, north of "the Federal Industrial District of New Orleans." The city has been destroyed by hurricane Vanessa, a Category 5 hurricane that happened a few years after Katrina, with "180-mile-per-hour winds, pushing a storm surge thirty feet tall." What used to be the city is now "a giant petrochemical refinery, ringed by flooded lowlands so polluted that the water of its fouled lagoons could melt the skin right off your hand." The workers at the refinery are housed in a vast, crime-filled slum of trailers known as the N.O. Housing District, "radiating outward for ten miles in all directions." Even airplanes are not allowed over the area; the skies are patrolled by fighter jets.

The Interstate highways now have checkpoints on them at various places, and Wolgast and Doyle have to go through one at the Mississippi border. They are patrolled by heavily armed guards wearing Kevlar vests, and there are long lines waiting to be cleared through. Wolgast shows a young guard their FBI ID's so they can be waved through quickly, but his eagerness to move on attracts the attention of another guard who points his weapon at them. The first guard cools him down, and they are sent ahead to a station to be cleared: "everybody was on a centralized system now, their movements tracked." The Homeland Security officer even knows that they had been booked on a flight to Denver, so he needs to check on that. Wolgast tells him, "We were redirected to Nashville to pick up a federal witness." When they return to their car, Doyle asks him why he said Nashville, when in fact they're going to Memphis. Wolgast explains that he knew this was the last checkpoint before Nashville, "so the system won't know we never went there." They can make their pickup in Memphis and, by using several unchecked detours, make their way through Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas on their way to Colorado, where Sykes can arrange their clearance further.

Their mission has been spelled out in the message from Sykes:

Caucasian female. Amy NLN. Zero footprint. 20323 Poplar Ave., Memphis, TN. Make pickup by Saturday noon latest. No contact. TUR. Sykes. 
TUR: travel under radar.

Lawrence Grey works as a "sweep" in the Colorado facility supervised by Sykes and Richards. Grey is puzzled by the behavior of Subject Zero, who hasn't eaten for six days and moves only when Grey isn't watching. He doesn't know what Zero is, other than that he is "sort of human," with two arms, two legs, a head with ears, eyes and mouth, and even "something like a johnson." But he also glows much brighter on the infrared scans than a normal human heat source would. His body is hairless, "smooth and shiny as glass," and it looks like his "skin was stretched over lengths of coiled rope." His eyes are "the orange of highway cones" and he sheds his teeth, as many as half a dozen daily. They were as "long as the little swords you'd get in a fancy drink." Grey's job is to sweep them up every day and incinerate them. With those teeth, Zero could "unzip a rabbit and empty it out in two seconds flat."

For Grey, Zero is somehow more unnerving than the other "glowsticks" (or "sticks"), as they're called. Grey had been working on Level 4 for six months and has come to know the differences among them: Number Six is shorter, Number Nine more active, "Number Seven liked to eat hanging upside down and made a goddamn mess," and "Number One was always chatting away, that weird sound they made, a wet clicking from deep in their throats that reminded Grey of nothing." Zero is creepier because he seems to pay more attention to the observers behind the glass. Grey has to put on a biohazard suit and enter the room occupied by Zero, who has been enclosed behind bars, to clean up or deliver the rabbits Zero eats.

Even now, a wall of glass two inches thick between them and Zero hanging so that all Grey could see was his big glowing backside and spreading, clawlike feet -- Grey could still feel Zero's mind moving around the dark room, trolling like an invisible net.

Grey lives in a barracks along with other civilian workers. He is saving up his pay, which is comparable to what he made working on an oil rig, in an offshore account arranged for him. He pays no taxes. He plans to work at the facility for a couple of years longer and move someplace far away. He's forty-six and a smoker, and his father died just before turning sixty, so Grey figures he has only about ten years left to live. He's unable to leave the facility, which he figures from the license plates he's seen is in Colorado. The TV in the facility is censored: no news channels or even MTV or E!, and the commercials are blue-screened out.

He doesn't know how he has been selected for the job: He had been out of work for a year when he was called in for the interview. They knew about his record as a sex offender: Grey takes drugs, including Depo Provera, that amount to chemical castration. And they were pleased when he told them he had no family and no friends, and didn't even know his neighbors. He was flown to Cheyenne where he was met by Richards and put into a van with two other men, Jack and Sam -- they were told only first names were allowed. Along the way, Grey needed to urinate so badly that he finally persuaded Richards to stop and let him out, but he discovered that he would have been shot if he had used the occasion to escape.

 Lying in bed, Grey thinks about Jack and Sam, who had left the facility even though they had to stay a year or forfeit the money they made, so Grey volunteered for a double shift. He thinks about Zero, whose vital signs are monitored by a chip in his neck. His heart rate stays at a constant 120 beats per minute. [Normal human heart rate is 60-100.] He seems to Grey to be always awake, or like a cat: "A cat sleeping on a step wasn't really sleeping. A cat sleeping on a step was a coiled spring waiting for a mouse to totter along. What was Zero waiting for?"

Unnerved by his thoughts about Zero, Grey uses a relaxation technique the prison psychiatrist taught him to fall asleep. He dreams are based on memories of being caught in a sex act -- it's unclear whether it's masturbation or a homosexual act -- with his cousin Roy and being beaten with a belt by his stepfather, a man named Kurt, who seems to have sexually abused him. The six-year-old Grey had found his real father dead of a gunshot wound in his truck on a snowy morning. In Grey's dream, throughout which a voice is calling out to him, the snow turns to rabbits like the ones eaten by Zero. The rabbits "knew what he had done, not to Roy but to the other ones, the boys with their knapsacks walking home from school." And then Zero takes over the dream. Grey "opened his mouth to scream but no sound came."

Richards is awake, playing a computer game. He thinks about the escalation of terrorism since 9/11: "now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it." Richards had joined NOAH at its inception five years earlier, contacted by Cole, who called it "the new Manhattan Project" or even bigger. Cole was dead now, and only three people had survived the expedition, "not counting Fanning, who was already on his way to being ... well, what?" The site, and any other survivors, would have been obliterated by the missile that was fired at it. Fanning is "locked away" and Lear is at the facility in Colorado.

The secret that underlies the facility is a virus that promotes VSA -- Very Slow Aging -- by restoring "the thymus gland to its full and proper function." Lear had hypothesized in his early papers that it had extended human life and physical vigor "at select moments, throughout human history." Richards thought of it as "vampire stuff." The speculation was that the legend was based in fact, and that if it could be discovered and manipulated it could be used for good. The Bolivian excursion had been an encounter with the virus in its uncontrolled form and its only survivors were Lear, Fanning, a soldier and a grad student named Fortes. Lear had been brought into the excursion by Cole and "Special Weapons" -- though we don't know yet what that is: governmental, military, industrial or some combination of all of them. Now Lear spends all his time on L4. Richards speculates that what brought Lear into the project was the death of his wife: "how much of Project NOAH was really just one grieving man sitting in a basement, trying to undo his wife's death?"  

Now the project consisted of "eleven former death row inmates who glowed in the dark and scared the shit out of absolutely everybody."

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 material thin enough to penetrate.

A technician who had been exposed to the "sticks" had died in agony of the virus they carried. Richards has contemplated pulling the plug on the whole thing, using what Cole had called "the Elizabeth Protocol." "Only cole would have actually named it for the guy's dead wife." Richards has also been forced to hunt down the escapees, Jack and Sam, and kill them.

Lear has now requested a young female subject for the project because the thymus gland in such a subject would be better able to fight off the "unpleasant side effects" of the virus. And Richards had found the right one in a convent in Memphis. He trusts Wolgast to handle the nuns.

As Richards, who speaks a dozen languages, is listening to the "clicks and grunts" of the test subjects and trying to figure out if it's a language, Sykes appears, unable to sleep. He adjusts a monitor and looks at Zero, who turns out to be (if we haven't already guessed) Fanning. Richards tells Sykes that Carter is due to arrive in about three hours. Sykes wonders why there has been such an apparent rush to get him here, and Richards says the order came from Special Weapons, probably urged by Lear. Sykes worries that the haste may attract notice -- the usual protocol for transfer involved thirty days and three prisons. "There's always someone who's interested," he observes, even when Richards assures him that "Carter is already nobody." Richards goes back to listening to Giles Babcock, who is the "Number One" that Grey observed was "always chatting away."

[Fiction is a game. Sometimes it's Let's Pretend and sometimes it's Hide and Seek. And often it's both. The test is how well the author plays the game of pretending his story is real and of hiding just enough of it to keep the reader searching for it. The risk is that readers will become so annoyed or burdened by the suspension of disbelief or so frustrated by the puzzles they're asked to solve, that they'll give up playing. Cronin so far has kept the plausibility high, with a nice dovetailing of the realities of 2010 with the potential realities (the annihilation of New Orleans by another hurricane -- he could not have foreseen the BP disaster -- and the escalation of the war on terror into Iran). 

Where he runs into trouble with his version of Hide and Seek, I think, is in his choice of narrative voice: a third-person narrator who assumes various points of view -- Jeanette's, Wolgast's, Carter's, Lacey's, Grey's, Richards's. Although he could tell us everything as a third-person narrator, he chooses not to. He chooses only to tell what the person whose point of view he has assumed for the moment is thinking, feeling, or seeing. And that leads to a certain coyness in the narrative voice. We are being played with when he withholds details such as the exact nature of Grey's sexual offenses, or what really happened when Rachel Wood drowned, or exactly what the expedition in Bolivia was all about, and so on. It's forgivable because we all know the conventions of the thriller demand that we not be told too much too soon, but I sense that Cronin is a better writer than the conventions allow him to be.]

2. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 18-54

I. The Worst Dream in the World, 5-1 B.V., Two-Three

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In a series of e-mails, Jonas Abbott Lear, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, writes to his Harvard colleague and "squash partner," Paul Kiernan, about the expedition he is on in the Bolivian jungles. Although staffed by scientists from UCLA, Columbia and MIT, as well as Harvard, it's being conducted and financed by the army, specifically the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Lear suggests that the expedition may give him "the chance to solve the greatest mystery of all -- the mystery of death itself." Lear is also known as "the vampire guy," a label given him by a civilian named Mark Cole, who is somehow attached to the military contingent -- Lear guesses that he's with the NSA. 

Six days into the trek through the jungles, and twenty kilometers from "the site," Lear reports that they came across a statue: "A human being, but not quite: the bent animal posture, the clawlike hands and the long teeth crowding the mouth, the intense muscularity of the torso, details still visible, somehow, after how long?" He notes the resemblance to images discovered elsewhere: "the pillars at the temple of Mansarha, the carvings on the gravesite in Xianyang, the cave drawings in Côtes d'Amor." [Of these places, only Xianyang is easily located on a map, though there is a village called Mansara in India and the Côtes-d'Armor in Brittany.] He also reports that they seem to be encountering lots of bats.

Three days later, he sends Kiernan some jpegs of more "figures," presumably like the statue, and reports that they're within ten kilometers of the site. A post the next day is ominously blank, but two days later, "less than five kilometers from the grave site," he reports disaster: Swarms of bats attacked the expedition two nights earlier, killing four people and biting or scratching sex others, who are suffering from "what looks like some speeded-up version of Bolivian hemorrhagic fever." Last night they killed four more, including Cole: "they actually lifted him off his feet before they bored through him like hot knives through butter. There was barely enough of him left to bury." A few hours later, Lear responds to an e-mail from Kiernan with the subject line "don't be dumb, get the hell out, please," that they have radioed for evacuation of the most critically wounded survivors, but that the healthy ones, which include him, have decided to go on to the site. One of the scientists, Tim Fanning of Columbia, whom Lear had earlier reported as "the sickest of the lot," seems however to be improving.

The next night, apparently having reached the site, Lear e-mails only: "Now I know why the soldiers are here."

Anthony Lloyd Carter is on death row in Texas for murdering a Houston woman, Rachel Wood, whose lawn he mowed. He has had no visitors during the "one thousand three hundred and thirty-two days" he has been there, except for Mr. Wood, who came to tell Carter that he had found Jesus and forgave him. Which only puzzles Carter, who can't figure out why he killed Rachel Wood to start with. But now, to his surprise, the guards arrive to tell him he has a visitor.

The visitor is Brad Wolgast, a forty-four-year-old FBI agent, who is on a special assignment that has taken him to Nevada, Arizona, Louisiana, Kentucky, Wyoming, Florida, Indiana and Delaware, and now to Texas, which he hates because he spent three years there as a kid in Houston. He is accompanied by an agent named Phil Doyle, "not even thirty, a cherry-cheeked farmboy from Indiana." Wolgast has grown hardened to the job:

These men were black or white, fat or thin, old or young, but the eyes were always the same: empty, like drains that could suck the whole world down into them. It was easy to sympathize with them in the abstract, but only in the abstract. 

He lets Doyle fill him in on Carter's particulars: "African American, five foot four, a hundred and twenty pounds." He is nicknamed T-Tone. Carter has no family, and has a minor record for "petty stuff, panhandling, public nuisance, that kind of thing." Rachel Wood lived in River Oaks with her husband, a lawyer, and their two girls. She saw Carter one day with a sign, HUNGRY, PLEASE HELP, and decided to give him a job and to recommend him to her friends who needed yard work done. Two years later, one of the girls, five years old, saw Carter in the yard and started screaming. Rachel came to see what was wrong and screamed at Carter, then somehow fell into the swimming pool and drowned, perhaps in a struggle with Carter. A neighbor found him sitting on the side of the pool with Rachel's body floating in it. When he was arrested, Carter said only that he "wanted her to stop screaming. Then he asked for a glass of iced tea."

Wolgast wonders what had made Doyle sign up for this assignment. "Doyle had joined the  Bureau right after the Mall of America Massacre -- three hundred holiday shoppers gunned down by Iranian jihadists." He had been assigned to counterterrorism, but when the Army came to the Denver field office looking for volunteers for something called "Project NOAH," Doyle had signed up. Wolgast had signed up for it because is "looked like a dead end," which is what he was looking for after the divorce from his wife, Lila.

At the prison, the warden is reluctant to sign over Carter and says he'll need an order from the governor before he can proceed. This annoys Wolgast because it means he'll have to spend more time in Texas. After passing the request along to his superior, Col. Sykes, Wolgast and Doyle go to a bar, where they talk about the news that Wolgast has received in an e-mail from his ex-wife, Lila: She is marrying again and expecting a child. Doyle stays at the bar to pick up one of the college girls who are there, and Wolgast goes back to the motel, where he calls Lila to congratulate her. They had had a daughter, Eva, who we gather is dead, but after a moment of shared sadness, they quarrel and hang up.

We flash back to Wolgast's introduction to Project NOAH, a trip to "the compound," somewhere west of Denver in the mountains. He is met by a civilian named Richards, who takes him to see Col. Sykes, who tells him the basics: "The Army needed between ten and twenty death row inmates to serve in the third-stage trials of an experimental drug therapy, code-named 'Project NOAH." In exchange for their consent, the inmates would have their sentences commuted to life without parole." They would spend the rest of their lives under a new identity in a "white-collar" prison camp. All of them would be men between twenty and thirty-five with no family. 


When Wolgast asks what this is all about, Sykes tells him that ten years earlier the Centers for Disease Control had been contacted by a doctor in La Paz who had four patients with what looked like hantavirus. They were all Americans over fifty with terminal cancer who had been on trip in the jungle sponsored by an organization called Last Wish. They said they had been part of a group of fourteen, but had gotten separated from the rest of the group and were rescued by Franciscan friars who ran a trading post in the jungle. But after the doctor reported them, they all became well again, with no sign of either hanta or cancer. When scans were run on them, it was discovered that in all of them the thymus gland had enlarged to three times its size. And no only were they well, they had been rejuvenated: "It was like they were teenagers again: smell, hearing, vision, skin tone, lung volume, physical strength and endurance, even sexual function." But the effect didn't last: They all died, of aneurysm, heart attack or stroke, within eighty-six days.  

So the Army is looking for test subjects to see if the virus can be used to cure diseases. When Wolgast asks why the Army is in charge, Sykes points out the obvious military applications: "We've been at war for fifteen years, Agent. By the look of things, we'll be in it for fifteen more if we're lucky. I won't kid you. The single biggest challenge the military faces, has always faced, is keeping soldiers on the field." So if something could be done to patch up the wounded and send them back into combat swiftly, the Army would definitely be interested. 


Sykes turns Wolgast over to Richards again, but Wolgast has one last question: "Why NOAH? What's it stand for?" And when Sykes looks at Richards before replying, he senses that Richards represents whoever is really behind the project -- just as Lear had sensed that Cole, the civilian, was somehow in charge in the jungle. It isn't an acronym, Sykes indicates, and suggests that Wolgast look up the biblical Noah. Back home in Denver, Wolgast goes online and reads: "And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died." [So why isn't it Project METHUSELAH?"] And he realizes, "They'd chosen him because of Eva, because he'd had to watch his daughter die." 

The next morning, word comes that all is in order for Carter to be handed over to them. They meet Carter in the visiting room of the prison where Wolgast uses the clout of the FBI to have Carter's shackles removed. He sends Doyle for some food for Carter, a cheeseburger and fries, which Carter wolfs down. And then, remembering Carter's request when he was arrested, sends Doyle for iced tea. Looking at Carter, Wolgast senses "something about him, different from the others." And he presents the possibility of his leaving death row to him. "It always amazed Wolgast how much accepting the idea of commutation resembled the five stages of grief. Right now, Carter was in denial. The idea was just too much to take in." He shows him the writ, signed by Gov. Jenna Bush, whom Carter says he always liked "'when she was first lady.' Wolgast let the error pass." 


Doyle arrives with the iced tea, and something about the way Carter looks at it makes Wolgast think, "Anthony Carter wasn't guilty, at least not in the way the court had spun it.... Something had happened that day in the yard; the woman had died. But there was more to it, maybe a lot more." Carter touches the glass of iced tea and says he still needs time to figure out what happened on the day Rachel Wood was murdered. Wolgast remembers the quote about Noah, and says he can give Carter "All the time in the world. An ocean of time." And Carter agrees to the deal. 


Waiting for their flight out of Houston, Wolgast remembers the counselor talking to him and Lila after Eva's death. But then he's approached by an agent from the Huston FBI office who tells him that plans have changed and he won't be taking this flight, that there's a car waiting outside. He hands him a fax that Wolgast reads with disbelief, and then shows to Doyle, who has returned from the Taco Bell stand. "Sweet Jesus, Phil. It's a civilian." 

[I'm no fan of using e-mails as a narrative device, even though the epistolary novel is one of the oldest forms of the genre. (I can foresee the day when, if it hasn't happened yet and I mercifully missed it, someone will write a whole novel in tweets.)  I can see why Cronin chooses to do it: It sharply limits the point of view, and it introduces background in a tantalizing way without the need for extraneous exposition, dialogue, and characterization. But there's something a bit mechanical about it here, especially in comparison with Cronin's deft use of voice and point of view in the opening section. 

Questions are beginning to be answered, very artfully. There is a reference to "the Iran War," which is presumably the war that the radio "spoke all day" of in the first chapter. It seems to have been touched off by the Mall of America Massacre. The war seems to be not only in Iran, but also in Chechnya, as Sykes's reference to "a soldier on the ground in Khorramabad or Grozny" indicates. We can now calculate the year in which the novel is set as 2018: Wolgast, born in 1974, is forty-four years old, and the war has been going on for fifteen years, assuming that its starting point was in Iraq in 2003. And nothing much else has changed: Everyone in Texas is still driving "giant pickup trucks" even though gas is now "thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly steaming itself to death," suggesting that American inertia on energy and climate change has continued. And Jenna Bush is governor of Texas. 

That last is perhaps a little over the top, but Cronin still maintains his ability to subtly link one character with another. Anthony Carter's mind is "so blank it was like a pail with nothing in it." Wolgast lies in bed with the TV on, "not really caring one way or the other about it, but it gave his mind something to focus on." Cronin's characters have inner lives, even when they have an absence of inner life. The secondary mystery of Carter's murder of Rachel Wood also enriches the novel, giving us another puzzle to solve than the primary one of Project NOAH.]