JULY 13, 1977
SOUTH BRONX, NEW YORK
The warehouse complex was vast—as Lisa had thought, it wasn’t a series of separate, isolated buildings, but one single, interconnected facility. Lisa thought Saint John must have had fairly formidable resources at his disposal to have acquired a headquarters like this.
It wasn’t all Saint John commanded. As he led her through the complex, it was clear the Vipers were working hard. He took her through huge rooms filled with people working at long tables, assembling equipment, cleaning equipment, repairing equipment. Men soldered electronic components, screwed together intricate mechanisms, and packed smaller items into storage boxes.
Lisa had no idea what they were all doing, and her guide didn’t tell her. But what she did notice was the silence. Not of the work itself—the sound of their industry echoed across the big rooms of the warehouse—but the workers themselves remained unspeaking as they focused on their tasks.
“Why are you showing me all this?” asked Lisa, as they walked past another row of workers. Saint John stopped by the table and turned around.
“Because I want you to understand.”
Lisa frowned. “Understand what?” She gestured to the nearby workers. “I don’t even know what they’re doing.”
“I want you to understand that we are doing work here. I said we weren’t a gang. We aren’t. We are an organization, one dedicated to making New York a better place. To achieve our aims, we must come together with a purpose. We must follow a path, one from which we must not stray, one which we know to be true. To do that requires obedience, and a will to power.”
Lisa just shook her head.
Saint John smiled, and clicked his fingers. Immediately the worker closest to them stopped what he was doing, which was attaching the side panels to some kind of device with a long screwdriver.
“Henry-O,” said Saint John, “you work for me, don’t you?”
“Yes.” The man’s face was blank, his speech without expression.
“You would do anything for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
Lisa blanched. She didn’t understand what was happening, but she didn’t like any of it. Around them the others continued to work, their presence completely ignored.
“Thank you, Henry-O,” said Saint John. “You have served me well. You know what to do.”
At this, the worker lifted the screwdriver in his hand, and held it up to his throat. The end dug into his skin sharply.
Lisa reached for the screwdriver, acting on sheer instinct.
“Stop! What are you doing?”
She pulled on the man’s arm, forcing the screwdriver down. Blood trickled from his neck.
Next to her, Saint John laughed. He clicked his fingers again, and Henry-O’s arm went slack, Lisa’s own hands smacking into the worktable as the resistance was suddenly removed.
Lisa spun around to face Saint John.
“This is sick. You’re sick.”
“No, it is not sickness,” he said. “It is power.”
“Give me one good reason why I don’t walk out the door and bring the cops down on your head.”
“Oh, Dr. Sargeson, I hope I can give you more than one. You want to change the world, don’t you? Together, that’s exactly what we can do.”
He gestured for Lisa to move ahead. Lisa clenched her fists, shaking with anger and fear and a hundred other emotions. At the table, Henry-O was back at work as though nothing had happened.
Then, not quite believing what she was doing, Lisa followed Saint John from the room.
The office was large, its position at the top of a block of four giving it a commanding view of a vast warehouse space through two walls of wraparound windows. Saint John led the way into the room, then moved behind a big desk to a smaller door. He opened it, and gestured inside.
“Please? We have much to discuss.”
Lisa stepped through the door and found herself in a small room—a file room, the walls lined with metal shelves, the shelves stacked with books and file boxes. In the middle of the room was a small round table, with two chairs positioned on opposite sides. On the table was a silver knife with an outsized, crossed hilt and handle that made the weapon look more like a crucifix, and a silver goblet filled with something dark.
That was it. Enough was enough.
Lisa turned to leave, but Saint John was standing in the doorway. He closed the door and stepped forward, forcing Lisa to back up until she bumped into one of the chairs.
“Please, take a seat. I will explain what we are doing here and why I asked you to come.”
With little other choice, Lisa pulled the chair out and sat down. She glanced around the room, noticing for the first time that the books were all about psychology and psychiatry—academic texts, mostly, nearly all of them familiar to her.
Then she saw them. Among the file boxes were a set of binders, each labeled with a white sticker printed with just two words.
ROOKWOOD INSTITUTE
“What…?” She looked at Saint John, her mouth open in surprise as he sat across the table from her.
“Where did you get those? Who the hell are you?”
Saint John smiled. “You mean you don’t remember me? Or you don’t recognize me?”
Lisa shook her head in confusion.
“I’ve been a great admirer of yours,” he said. “Your papers on group thinking and the power of suggestion. Fascinating stuff. We even talked about those a little, when we first met.”
Lisa narrowed her eyes, her mind racing. Then she looked back at the binders.
The Rookwood Institute. Of course.
The penny dropped. She could see him now—his hair longer, the beard fully covering his face. And no sunglasses, of course.
Saint John nodded, seeing the recognition dawn on her face.
“I was part of the pilot program,” he said. “One of the first six prisoners.”
“I…,” whispered Lisa. “I had no idea. But…what are you doing? You said you were running your own program? Here?” She gestured to the files. “Are you basing it on my work?”
“I am running a program, yes,” he said. “You and your work were just the beginning. When I met you, you rekindled something inside me. Reminded me of a past I had tried to forget. Of work that I had done once, a long, long time ago. You could even call it divine inspiration.”
“Divine?”
Saint John ignored the interjection.
“I have been working hard, these last few months. There is so much work to do, to make everything ready. But I’ve used that time wisely. You’re not my first recruit. Far from it. I’ve spent months sending my brothers out into the city, commanding them to find the lost, the needy. Bringing them here, to me, where I can show them the truth, where I can reveal the plan to them. Where I can put them to work. Where I can put you to work.”
Lisa shook her head, and went to stand—
But she couldn’t move. She looked down, saw her own hands clenched on the arms of the chair, but…she couldn’t move them. Nor her legs. She was frozen in place.
“The Day of the Serpent comes.” Saint John nodded. “You have seen it too, haven’t you? I can see it in your eyes. Soon the darkness shall cover the earth, and He shall claim His throne.”
Lisa stared at twin reflections of herself in the man’s mirrored glasses. She felt…faint, but not sleepy—awake, alive, every fiber of her being tingling with electricity. Sitting opposite, Saint John seemed a long way away, too far even to touch. Around her, the metal shelves of the small room seemed to undulate, like waves cresting on a beach.
There was a bang from behind her. She snapped her head up, the room refocusing, Saint John coming into pin-sharp clarity in front of her.
He looked angry.
“Get out,” he said, to whoever it was who had burst through the door.
Lisa flexed her fingers, and found she could turn around in the chair. Standing in the doorway was one of Saint John’s men.
“There’s trouble downstairs,” he said.
“Then handle it.”
“It’s the new guy and Martha. I think you need to come down.”
Saint John’s nostrils flared in anger and he stood up. He cast one look at Lisa, then stormed out, slamming the door so hard the shelves rattled.
Lisa leaped out of the chair, thankful that she could now move, not knowing if what she’d just experienced had even really happened.
But one thing she was certain of: the door was locked.
She pulled on the doorknob, rattling it, but it was no use.
But a locked door wasn’t going to stop her. She pressed her ear to the wood and closed her eyes as she listened, then dropped down onto her knees. Plucking a metal hairpin from her hair, she unfolded it and poked it into the lock, grateful now for her time studying escapology as part of her stage magician’s routine—although she’d never thought she would ever use those skills to save her own life.