The Passage (The Passage, #1)

by Justin Cronin

Richards remembered the day—that glorious and terrible day—watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24–7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn’t even remember why. He’d thought it right then; no, he’d felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they’d all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war—the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more—the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are—would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn’t notice and couldn’t remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and...

My working theory of villainy in fiction is that the best villains need to be smarter and more interesting than everybody else. Richards is no exception. He’s more than a cynic; he’s the dark prophet of the novel, the man who knows just how bad the world is and how much worse it’s about to get.This delights him; he had no illusions about himself and knows he’s a man perfectly suited for the age. That said, I wrote this part of the novel during some of the worst of the Iraq war. By 2005, the conflict had devolved into a total quagmire with no clear end. The post-9/11 “war on terror” was looking very much as if it was going to become a permanent condition—a grinding, never-ending state of conflict, dispersed across the globe. Twenty years later, it seems I wasn’t wrong—and neither was Richards.