necessary skills and determination, could break even the most sophisticated security codes. This was the danger of terrorism: it pitted the cunning of a single individual hiding in a crowd against the colossal might of the most powerful nations on earth.
Now fifty-nine, Pedro Alarcón had been forced to leave Uruguay during the bloody dictatorship in 1976. At eighteen he had joined the tupamaros , an urban Communist guerrilla organization waging an armed struggle against the government, convinced that only by violence could they change Uruguay’s prevailing regime of abuse, corruption, and injustice. The tupamaros planted bombs, robbed banks, and kidnapped people before being crushed by the army: some had died fighting, some were executed, others captured and tortured, the rest forced into exile. Alarcón, who had begun his adult life assembling homemade bombs and forcing locks, still had a framed poster from the 1970s, now yellowed with age, showing him with three of his tupamaro comrades and offering a reward from the military for their capture. The pallid boy in the photo, with his long, shaggy hair, his beard, and his astonished expression, was very different from the man Ryan knew, a short, wiry gray-haired man, all bones and sinew, intelligent and imperturbable, with the manual dexterity of an illusionist.
These days Alarcón was professor of artificial intelligence at Stanford University and competed as a triathlete with Ryan, who was twenty years his junior. Aside from their shared passion for technology and sport, both were men of few words, which was why they got along so well. They both lived frugal lives and were bachelors; if anyone asked, they’d claim they’d seen too much of life to believe in schmaltzy love stories or to be tied down to one woman when there were so many willing beauties in the world, but deep down they suspected that they had ended up alone out of sheer bad luck. According to Indiana Jackson, growing old alone meant dying of heartache, and though they would never have admitted it, secretly they agreed.
Within minutes Pedro Alarcón had picked the lock on the main door and managed to disable the alarm, and both men stepped into the house. Ryan used his cell phone as a flashlight, keeping a tight grip on Attila, who was ready to do battle—straining at the leash, panting, teeth bared, a low growl coming from deep in his throat.
In a sudden flash, as had so often happened at the most inopportune moments, Ryan found himself back in Afghanistan. Part of his brain could process what was happening: post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which were flashbacks, night terrors, depression, and fits of crying or rage. Ryan had struggled to overcome the temptation to commit suicide, recovered from the addictions to alcohol and drugs that a few years earlier had all but killed him, but he knew they could come back at any time. He could never let his guard down; these symptoms were his enemy now.
He could hear his father’s voice: no man fit to wear the uniform would bitch about having carried out orders or blame the navy for his nightmares, war is for the brave and the strong, if you’re scared of blood, get a different job. Another part of his brain reeled off the statistics he knew by heart: 2.3 million American combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, 6,179 dead, 47,000 wounded, most with devastating injuries, 210,000 war vets being treated for the same syndrome he suffered from, to say nothing of the epidemic that had devastated the armed forces: an estimated 700,000 soldiers suffering psychological problems or with brain damage.
And still there was a small, dark corner of Ryan’s mind—a part he could not control—that was trapped in the past, in that night in Afghanistan.
A group of Navy SEALs advances through the desert terrain, heading for a village in the foothills of the mountains. Their orders are to conduct a house-to-house search, dismantle the
Now fifty-nine, Pedro Alarcón had been forced to leave Uruguay during the bloody dictatorship in 1976. At eighteen he had joined the tupamaros , an urban Communist guerrilla organization waging an armed struggle against the government, convinced that only by violence could they change Uruguay’s prevailing regime of abuse, corruption, and injustice. The tupamaros planted bombs, robbed banks, and kidnapped people before being crushed by the army: some had died fighting, some were executed, others captured and tortured, the rest forced into exile. Alarcón, who had begun his adult life assembling homemade bombs and forcing locks, still had a framed poster from the 1970s, now yellowed with age, showing him with three of his tupamaro comrades and offering a reward from the military for their capture. The pallid boy in the photo, with his long, shaggy hair, his beard, and his astonished expression, was very different from the man Ryan knew, a short, wiry gray-haired man, all bones and sinew, intelligent and imperturbable, with the manual dexterity of an illusionist.
These days Alarcón was professor of artificial intelligence at Stanford University and competed as a triathlete with Ryan, who was twenty years his junior. Aside from their shared passion for technology and sport, both were men of few words, which was why they got along so well. They both lived frugal lives and were bachelors; if anyone asked, they’d claim they’d seen too much of life to believe in schmaltzy love stories or to be tied down to one woman when there were so many willing beauties in the world, but deep down they suspected that they had ended up alone out of sheer bad luck. According to Indiana Jackson, growing old alone meant dying of heartache, and though they would never have admitted it, secretly they agreed.
Within minutes Pedro Alarcón had picked the lock on the main door and managed to disable the alarm, and both men stepped into the house. Ryan used his cell phone as a flashlight, keeping a tight grip on Attila, who was ready to do battle—straining at the leash, panting, teeth bared, a low growl coming from deep in his throat.
In a sudden flash, as had so often happened at the most inopportune moments, Ryan found himself back in Afghanistan. Part of his brain could process what was happening: post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which were flashbacks, night terrors, depression, and fits of crying or rage. Ryan had struggled to overcome the temptation to commit suicide, recovered from the addictions to alcohol and drugs that a few years earlier had all but killed him, but he knew they could come back at any time. He could never let his guard down; these symptoms were his enemy now.
He could hear his father’s voice: no man fit to wear the uniform would bitch about having carried out orders or blame the navy for his nightmares, war is for the brave and the strong, if you’re scared of blood, get a different job. Another part of his brain reeled off the statistics he knew by heart: 2.3 million American combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, 6,179 dead, 47,000 wounded, most with devastating injuries, 210,000 war vets being treated for the same syndrome he suffered from, to say nothing of the epidemic that had devastated the armed forces: an estimated 700,000 soldiers suffering psychological problems or with brain damage.
And still there was a small, dark corner of Ryan’s mind—a part he could not control—that was trapped in the past, in that night in Afghanistan.
A group of Navy SEALs advances through the desert terrain, heading for a village in the foothills of the mountains. Their orders are to conduct a house-to-house search, dismantle the
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