Ghost War (A Christopher Wren Thriller Book 4) by Mike Grist & Michael John Grist

Author:Mike Grist & Michael John Grist [Grist, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birkbeck, University Of London
Published: 2020-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

GRUBER 3

When Sally Rogers burned, something in Steven Gruber died. The flames. The flailing. The screams. He had nothing left in him after that, no further place to retreat to. Feeling the scorching heat on his bare skin, he finally understood the message they were trying to teach him.

He was nothing.

But they didn't want understanding from him. Understanding suggested some kind of consent, and there was no consent to this. It was more like they were reaching inside him, past his personality, his history, his memories, the shreds of some lost idea of who he was and all NSA hardening training, and trying to make him into something different.

Make him the thing they needed him to be.

Now the past addictions of Steven Gruber felt as vague and insubstantial as childhood beliefs; that Santa Claus was real, that the Tooth Fairy came and left money at night. They were ridiculous. They had never really been real.

Only this was real. Defeat that became victory, as they remade him into something new.

The figure stood before him. The man with the sparkling blue eyes.

"Steven," he said.

Steven. It was his name, but what did it mean now? It was an insult. Proof that he hadn't reached the point he yet had to reach, and he wanted nothing more than to prove that he had.

"Don't call me that," he said.

The man said nothing. It was too hard for Gruber to even raise his head. He hadn't been able to look Rogers in her eyes before she burned. Now he saw how arrogant he'd been earlier, to ask this man what he should say. As if anything could be done by his permission. As if 'what he wanted' and 'what he understood' mattered at all. All that mattered was this new truth.

He was theirs. Body and mind, he belonged to them. They flowed through him like blood, and he was just an instrument of their hand.

"Then what should I call you?" the man asked.

Gruber had no answer.

"What is your name?" the man repeated.

Gruber said nothing. He looked at the floor. There was no battle now. Or, perhaps, the battle had changed.

"Let's try another," the man said. "An old favorite. An oldie but a goldie."

Gruber knew what was coming. The same words that had been searing through his mind for as long as he could remember, picking up clues from their questions, doing the work of reframing by himself, remaking himself like clay at the potter's hand. Becoming.

"Who is Christopher Wren?"

He'd failed before. He'd begged. He hadn't really been listening, hadn't been open, had been so resistant even when they'd hammered on that door until listening didn't matter. For a time he'd thought that surrender to this had been the linchpin, the one thing he could cling to stay sane, but now he knew that sanity was the crazy notion.

Sanity was not a thing. Wren's name was not a linchpin. It was just one more step on a sliding scale into nothingness, and nothingness was better than death in the fires.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.