5. The Passage, by Justin Cronin, pp. 164-208

I. The Worst Dream in the World, 5-1 B.V., Eleven-Fourteen

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Realizing the futility of trying to outrun the state troopers, Wolgast decides to surrender. Doyle agrees, so they turn back to the small town of Randall, Oklahoma, where they find a deputy sheriff eating breakfast at a diner. He takes them to the sheriff's office, where they're locked up while the sheriff calls the state troopers. But before the troopers can get there, Richards arrives, shoots everyone else in the sheriff's office, takes Wolgast, Doyle and Amy to the waiting helicopter, and, when the troopers arrive, uses a rocket to blast the remaining piece of evidence, the Tahoe, to bits.

Thirty-four days later, Wolgast is alone in a closely guarded room at the compound, having been there, separated from Amy and Doyle, since they arrived. Sykes appears, looking disheveled and worn, to ask Wolgast's help. They think Amy is dying and that Wolgast may be able to communicate with her. He is taken down to the subterranean observation room where he sees Amy on a hospital bed, connected to tubes. He's introduced to Fortes, who also looks exhausted. Fortes tells him that Amy is in a coma and they want Wolgast to try to talk to her. He refuses to wear the hazmat suit into the airlocked chamber: "It's not going to help if she wakes up and sees me in a space suit." Sykes authorizes the breach of protocol.

Grey has continued his routine as a sweeper, but like everyone else he is showing signs of stress. He notices Paulson in the commissary, looking "like shit, his skin stretched so tight over his face you could see the edges of his bones." Davis, too, on the security level, looks bad. Grey asks himself, "What is everyone so afraid of?"

Carter has become Number Twelve. He has lain there feeling sick as the virus takes effect: "something was happening to him, but it wasn't happening fast enough for the men in the suits." He also begins hearing voices, and realizes that there are twelve others like him. Finally, he breaks the restraints that hold him and attacks the tech, Pujol. "Anthony fell on him swiftly, from above. A scream and then the man was silent in wet pieces on the floor. The beautiful warmth of blood! He drank and drank."

Richards watches the video of the attack on Pujol, and observes that Carter had been taking the same form of the virus that they had been giving Amy. They had brought Carter under control by shining lights on him. Richards decides that Project NOAH is ready to become Operation Jumpstart: they will move the "sticks" to White Sands where the military will prepare for their use as weapons: "Just imagine what one of these things could do, say, in the mountain caves of northern Pakistan, or the eastern deserts of Iran, or the shot-up buildings of the Chechen Free Zone." Richards thinks it's "the stupidest idea he'd ever heard of in his life," and Sykes agrees, but he's following the orders from Special Weapons. Lear, Sykes says, doesn't know about it: "He still thinks he's trying to save the world."

Richards had killed the nuns, except for Lacey, who was still at large, and is preparing himself for liquidating the sweeps, techs and the soldiers. He spends his time watching the monitors, looking at Wolgast, who has sat by Amy day after day, and subject Number One, Giles Babcock, who stares at the camera as if waiting for the day when he can kill Richards. Then a call comes from the front gate that a black woman with an accent is there, looking for Wolgast.

Wolgast has been talking to Amy, and he tells her the story of the death of his daughter, Eva, who died of a heart defect three weeks short of her first birthday. When he tells Amy that when he found her "It was like she'd come back to me" and asks her to come back, she opens her eyes.

Lacey, who has made her way to the compound, sometimes riding, sometimes walking, and unerringly finding places to stay, is now running through the woods with the guards firing at her. She manages to escape and clamber on board a truck carrying a cargo of explosives.

Richards goes to the room where Doyle is being kept and orders him out. As they're walking across the parking lot, Doyle asks if Lacey is here yet. Astonished, Richards asks how he knows. Doyle says, "I could hear her coming."

Grey, on L4, hears Zero telling him "It's time." He enters the chamber, "and as Zero's bite found the soft place on his neck where the blood moved, he knew at last what the tenth rabbit was. The tenth rabbit was him."

While Richards is distracted by the sound of the alarm, Doyle escapes. Richards runs to the monitors and discovers that all of the chambers holding subjects were empty. They had all been released by the sweeps. On the monitors he sees Davis, dead, and watches as Paulson blows his brains out on camera. He tries to seal off the level, but there is an explosion in the elevator shaft and the lights go out.

Wolgast hears the commotion and the explosion, and when the emergency lights go on he makes his way to Amy's bed and disconnects her IVs. He is trying to decide what to do when the airlock opens and a long-haired, bearded, disheveled man appears. He talks about what has happened -- "the way they swooped down from the trees. Like the bats." But Wolgast doesn't understand what he's talking about. He introduces himself as Jonas Lear, but Wolgast has never heard the name. As Lear leads them, Wolgast sees Fortes's body and then others. Finally they encounter Grey, covered in blood, who collapses after saying, "I said to myself, Grey, you are having the worst dream in the world." Lear urges Wolgast to leave Grey behind, and leads Wolgast, carrying Amy, to a ventilation shaft with a ladder that goes to the surface. But when they enter, Lear closes the door, staying behind.

Richards makes his way through the turmoil to Sykes's office, where he finds the colonel wounded and vomiting blood. At Sykes's request, Richards shoots him.

Lacey has jumped from the truck and hidden in the woods, where she watches one of the "sticks" jump from an upper window and land in the trees a hundred yards away. Then others appear, and "one by one the demons fell upon the soldiers and they died." She leaves the woods, and when a soldier orders her to halt, a "demon" lands on him. She runs toward the building.

Wolgast is daunted by the task of carrying Amy up the ladder, holding her in one arm as he uses the other to climb, but he starts the attempt.

Richards exits the building and sees the truck carrying the explosives.

Doyle has been hiding in a first-floor office when Lacey appears. She tells him she knows where Wolgast and Amy are. He tells her that he heard her, "All these weeks." She tells him, "It wasn't me you heard, Agent Doyle."

Wolgast reaches the top of the ladder, but now faces the problem of getting Amy and himself into the duct next to the ladder. He manages to wake her enough to help him swing her into the opening, but he loses his balance and begins to fall, managing to save himself by grabbing the ridge of metal at the opening with his fingertips. He hoists himself into the opening and they scoot along the duct until they reach a grate. It is bolted from the outside, and Wolgast is about to lose hope when he hears Doyle say, "Chief?"

Richards makes it to the truck and finds a grenade launcher, which he loads and carries outside, calling, "Here kitty, kitty!"

Doyle finds a penknife and opens the grate. Wolgast is surprised to see Lacey there. Doyle tells him, "Trust me, I don't get it either." At the front entrance, they see more dead soldiers. Doyle goes outside where he finds a silver Lexus with the keys in it, as well as a gun. He gives the keys to Wolgast, who realizes that Doyle and Lacey will stay behind, if necessary, to let him and Amy escape. They leave the building, with Doyle leading, running toward the car.

Richards, carrying the RPG, encounters Carter, but misses because Carter is already leaping into the air. The grenade explodes into the building as Richards "experienced the sensation, utterly new to him, of being torn in half."

The exploding grenade knocks Wolgast down and deafens him in one ear. He also loses his grip on Amy, but when he finds her she is unhurt. He puts Amy in the back seat of the Lexus and starts the car just as Carter lands on the hood. He backs up quickly and dislodges Carter, who leaps into the air and disappears. The passenger door opens and Lacey gets in, holding a gun, which she drops on the floor. Doyle is running toward the car, yelling, "Just go!" There is a thump on the roof of the car that Wolgast knows is Carter, so he hits the brakes, sending Carter onto the hood. Doyle fires at Carter, but the bullets have no effect except that Carter notices Doyle and sails through the air. "Wolgast turned in time to see the creature that had once been Anthony Carter fall upon his partner, taking him in like a giant mouth."

They speed away, but Lacey tells him to stop: She is bleeding and "They will follow the blood." She tells him to take care of Amy and gets out of the car. He watches in the mirror as she waves her arms to attract the "demons" and they descend on her.

[It's clear that Cronin knows the conventions (not to say the clichés) of the thriller: The scene in which Richards walks into the sheriff's office and methodically shoots everyone appears in dozens of movies and TV dramas. So do the self-sacrificing good guys (Doyle, Lacey, possibly Lear). The various explosions -- the torpedoed Tahoe, the blasted elevator shaft, the RPG destroying the building and knocking Wolgast off course -- seem like instructions to the screenwriters for the inevitable movie. (Ridley Scott has the rights.) Even Wolgast hanging by his fingertips in the ventilation shaft -- and for that matter, the escape by ventilation shaft -- evokes a sense of déjà vu. (Has anyone in that predicament ever really been able to hoist themselves up to safety?) This is not to denigrate Cronin's skill in using them, however. Just a wish to see something new.]

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

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

_____

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

_____

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.]