For a short time he, like his father, had been a rabid believer. After years living in violence and squalor as the son of a traitor, he’d seen the bureaucrats enslaving him as saviors, and he’d seen the opportunities they gave him as proof of the egalitarian superiority of communism.

Dresner could still remember the force of his need to belong to something greater than himself. To be understood and respected. To emerge from the shadow of his traitorous family and prove his devotion to the country that had embraced him despite his lineage.

It was a strangely happy—almost ecstatic—time in his life. But it hadn’t lasted. The promise of communism gleamed bright and then quickly burned out. Just as his father had promised.

Not long after he escaped, the entire malignancy called the Soviet Union had collapsed. But in many ways, that collapse had made the world even more dangerous. Humanity’s evil now churned quietly beneath the surface, growing at a geometric rate, but never coalescing into something tangible enough to fight.

The technology and social mobility that had once held the same promise as communism were again being twisted by a species that would simply not allow itself to live in peace and prosperity. Bizarre ideologies were replacing religion as the opiate of the masses and were being used by politicians to keep the common man off balance. Concentrations in wealth were returning to the corrosive levels of the distant past. Weapons of mass destruction were falling into the hands of fanatics. The world’s financial systems had become a boom-and-bust engine that enriched its participants while starving everyone else.

And the trend seemed to be an inescapable downward spiral. The growing choices in media allowed people to retreat from anything that didn’t reinforce their own prejudices—creating an increasingly xenophobic population consumed with passion and unencumbered by facts. Wars were being fought over resources that weren’t yet scarce, and democracy was deteriorating into nothing more than the tyranny of an ill-informed and superstitious majority.

He’d believed he could change it all. Like so many before him, he’d thought he could perfect humanity. Create a Utopia.

Dresner looked down at the snowflakes melting on the spotted, damaged skin of his hands. With another fifty years he would have succeeded. He would have triumphed where Plato, Marx, and even God himself had failed.

But that dream was dead—a victim of time and the encroaching frailty that he so carefully hid. Now the best he could do was take a place in history among the monsters he despised. It was the only way to give humanity the time it needed to save itself.

13

Khost Province
Afghanistan

RANDI RUSSELL EASED LEFT on the steep slope and leaned against a boulder, making the outline of her body unrecognizable as it melded with the stone. A three-quarter moon was nearly overhead and the hazy streak of the Milky Way cut across the black sky, casting a dull glow over the landscape.

The three men tracking the same fleeing Afghan she was were below, completely invisible in the inky bottom of the canyon. She’d made it to within a hundred meters of them a couple hours ago and spent a few minutes watching and listening. Languages were one of her greatest gifts but she hadn’t understood anything she’d heard beyond identifying it as Ukrainian.