"This is what you'll need for your mission."
Helmut Zemo suddenly felt a weight in his hands. He looked down and found a briefcase in his grip. The strangeness of it startled him. He had just raised his head to ask a question when a gust of damp air smelling of silt rushed at his face. The intense light made his eyes sting so much he could barely open them. In a daze, the roar of cars and human voices surged around him like a tide, and when he finally managed to squint them open, he discovered he was sitting on a bench, a wide river flowing slowly before him. One moment earlier he had been in an opaque tent—very likely in Latovinia—where the air held the sweet scent of tea and honey and the cold metallic tang of power armor; the next, he was seated on a park bench, with cars and pedestrians moving lazily through the shade behind him.
The sudden shift in scene chilled him to the bone; his heart hammered, and the smell of ionized air filled his nose.
Had he been injected with an anesthetic and transported here? Or had he, for some reason, forgotten what had happened moments ago? Was it an injectable anesthetic or an inhaled one? What kind of drug could erase memory of a specific period? How had they moved him without arousing suspicion?
He ran through every possibility in his mind, and then quickly discarded them.
Because he was sitting here perfectly intact; there was no numbness in his extremities, his blood sugar was normal, his skin temperature normal—signs he had not been drugged and moved. He had no idea what had happened. Everything about it was uncanny and bizarre. Terror, deep as marrow, stiffened his limbs until he could not move, only sit on the bench—understanding that this was a show of force to compel him to follow the plan. Yet when he gazed across the river, the urgency of life and death, the helpless anger and pain, were washed from his mind by the beauty before him, and memories of the past surged over him like a roaring sea.
There was the familiar spire and ranks of fervent red roofs, the buildings glowing with fairytale warmth in the sun. The slow current shimmered like a black silk ribbon shot through with gold. Greenery sprouting between white walls across the river dotted the view like leaves in a flowerbed, setting off the ascending sequence of landmarks—Kafka Museum, the Lesser Town Bridge Tower, St. Nicholas Church, Lobkowicz Palace—leading the eye to the splendid palatial spires in the distance. Helmut Zemo breathed carefully, as if even the air held a dreamlike quality he dared not break.
He was in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic—the City of a Hundred Spires.
That was Prague Castle, and beside it St. Vitus Cathedral, places he had once visited with his wife. The river before him was the Vltava; the steel bridge not far off had to be Charles Bridge. The view stirred his memories: during their honeymoon they had eaten at the Czech restaurant Restaurant Pod Věží opposite the Karel Zeman Museum, and attended a performance by the Czech Philharmonic at the Rudolfinum. Every brick here had witnessed their laughter. He would never forget those afternoons strolling the Vltava embankment with his wife, eating cranberry ice cream; never forget the sunlight piercing the leaves to fall across her smiling face. The vivid green leaves and white walls, the plump orange cats and the women in white summer dresses—the sight was so beautiful he could scarcely breathe.
After a long moment, Helmut Zemo finally lowered his head again.
Clenching his teeth, he wiped away the regret and grief from his face and summoned the fire of rage from deep within. With stiff fingers, he opened the briefcase. He examined its contents carefully—inside were several false identities, addresses of safehouses, accounts opened under those identities, some Czechoslovak koruna and Hungarian forint, and a phone number for use in emergencies. He naturally recalled the use of these items and every detail of the plan, as if someone had stuffed the entire complex operation and all necessary intelligence into his mind. Part of it followed the steps he himself had originally designed, but it was embellished with many added details and targets, and the resources (people, materiel, and networks) at his disposal were beyond anything he had dared imagine. He even had the option to call in a ballistic missile strike on a specified location—the price being merely a few more names added to a list. Everything he wanted was within reach.
Yet he could not recall what the man he had spoken with looked like, what he wore, or how his voice sounded. He remembered only the giants in magnificent golden armor. There was a blank in his memory, as if he had bargained not with a warlord but with a devil—made a Faustian deal and gotten what he desired. In the briefcase he also found a phone. It was his own, taken by the women in black power armor when he was arrested. The cheap handset held no sensitive data; he treasured it because it contained a single recording.
He pressed play, closed his eyes, and listened one last time to his wife's final words. Though the fear in his heart refused to dissipate, Helmut Zemo felt no regret. If he had sold his soul to the devil, he had fetched a fair price—he had obtained what he wanted.
The Undying City had a disaster reconstruction system, with a contingency plan tailored to the homeless separated from their families. Compared with Western aid models for refugees, the Undying City's approach was far more robust. For example, it organized work-for-relief programs under corporate entities, instituted standardized management while providing assistance to women, the elderly, children, and the disabled, rather than merely handing out cash and ignoring everything else. The lazy were filtered out; the diligent were promoted. As the aid programs rolled out, the Undying City's influence took root in the region, eventually becoming its de facto governing power.
Given the Undying City's shortage of manpower, Stephanie would find every means to absorb newcomers; cultivating targeted talent among refugees was one such method. The reason was simple: education was a pillar of Solomon's vision. The rational world he championed required knowledge as its foundation. Whether in Latovinia or Ukraine, on the African continent or in Latin America, temporary schools established by the Undying City could be found. Lecturers tirelessly instilled in young people the precepts of the Undying City's The Unified Truth—because the book stitched together a wealth of Marxist-Leninist theory while advocating reason and science as the primary spirit for building a world of equality, creating freedom for both the collective and the individual. It filled the ideological vacuum left in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Unified Truth was highly aggressive and expansionary. Its advocacy of unity and the subordination of individual interests to the collective was well-suited to refugees banding together to survive, and thus it found broad support among ordinary people. Once they chose that way of life, the latter chapters—on the future prospects of the human species and a new order—became easier to accept, and it inevitably brought to mind the now-dissolved Soviet Union. Many people abandoned religion (at least on the surface—abandoning religion was not compulsory), and turned instead to the ideals promoted by the Undying City. Similar scenes played out in Africa and Latin America alike, welcoming all comers, from guerrillas to Liberation Theology.
Solomon's ideal began to burn across the world like a spark—small flames for now, but he was convinced the prairie fire would sweep through before long. The world needed a purging flame—of that there was no doubt. Without it, humanity had no future.
Stephanie glanced up at a message on her computer screen. "Diana," she called to her secretary, reaching out a hand. "Have Mrs. Zemo, the copyist, come to my office."
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