November 14, 2002 · Army Careers Centre, Cambridge · 09:23 hrs
The Army Careers Centre on Regent Street occupied a narrow terraced building that smelled of institutional carpet and printer toner and the particular kind of ambition that manifests as paperwork. Its front window displayed a poster of a soldier silhouetted against a sunrise, carrying a rifle and the implicit promise that enlistment was a transaction with clear terms on both sides. Sergeant First Class Robert Davies had been sitting behind the intake desk for nine years, and he had developed, across those nine years, a taxonomy of the men who came through his door.
There were the boys running from something — a court date, a relationship, a future they couldn't picture. There were the boys running toward something — money, structure, the camaraderie of men who shared dirt and cold and the specific intimacy of people who might die together. There were the boys who had watched too many films, and the boys who hadn't watched enough, and the boys who simply had nowhere else to go and had the good sense to recognize it. Davies could place most men within ninety seconds. It was not a skill he was proud of exactly, but it was a skill, and it had served him.
The young man who came in on the fourteenth of November did not fit the taxonomy.
He was slender, pale in the way of someone who had been spending too much time indoors, and dressed in a coat that had seen better days over clothes that hadn't. Late teens or early twenties, Davies estimated, though there was something about the face that complicated the estimate — a quality of settled stillness that belonged to a much older arrangement of features. His eyes were very blue and they moved across the room in a single, unhurried sweep when he entered — not nervously, the way new recruits' eyes moved, cataloguing threats and exits — but with the calm, comprehensive attention of someone conducting a survey.
He sat in the intake chair and placed a folder on the desk without being asked. Davies opened it.
Cambridge University. Virological Sciences. First class honours. He was nineteen years old and he had a degree that most people spent twice that long trying to acquire. Davies turned the pages with the particular care of someone who suspects the document is telling them less than it appears to.
"You're a Cambridge graduate," Davies said. He kept his voice even, professional, the voice he used when he was deciding what to think. "Honours degree in Virological Sciences. Son, you should be in a laboratory somewhere making six figures and presenting at conferences. Not sitting across from me asking to carry a rifle in the mud." He set the folder down. "Why the Infantry?"
The young man was still. Not the stillness of someone composing an answer — the stillness of someone who had already composed it and was waiting for the correct moment to deliver it. He had not shifted position since sitting down. His hands rested on his knees with a relaxed precision that Davies, who had trained recruits for years, associated with either extensive physical conditioning or some neurological quality he didn't have a clinical name for.
"I'm done with theory, Sergeant."
Davies leaned back slightly. "The Infantry isn't theory's opposite, lad. It's cold and it's wet and it's boring for very long stretches punctuated by moments where people are actively trying to kill you. It's not a gap year."
"I know," the young man said. His voice had a quality Davies couldn't immediately place — soft, carrying no performance of confidence, and somehow more authoritative for the absence of performance. "I'm counting on it."
Davies studied him for a moment. In nine years he had heard most variants of the recruitment interview and had developed an instinct for the difference between men who said things and meant them and men who said things because they had heard them in films. This was neither of those. This was something that sounded like it came from somewhere further down than the chest — from some settled, worked-out place that did not require the performance of conviction because conviction was simply what was there.
"Raccoon City," the young man said. He reached into his coat pocket and produced a folded piece of paper — a printed article, worn at the folds, the kind of document that had been handled often. He placed it on the desk. "I was fourteen when it happened. I analyzed the data. I know what the official account omitted and I know what it means for what comes next." He paused. "I don't want to be reading about the next one from a laboratory. I want to be in the room where it ends."
Davies looked at the article, then at the young man, then at the article again. The paper was a printout of the official containment report from 1998 — but it had handwritten annotations in the margins, dense and precise, in a handwriting so small and even it might have been typeset. Davies couldn't read the specifics. He didn't need to. The density of annotation alone told him everything he needed to know about how long this young man had been thinking about this.
He looked at the blue eyes across the desk.
He had recruited hundreds of men. He had sent them to Helmand and Kosovo and places he wasn't permitted to name in civilian company. He had learned to read the particular quality of purpose that made a man something more than a body filling a uniform. He thought he had seen every version of it.
What he saw across the desk now was not the blank-eyed commitment of someone with nothing to lose, which was manageable. It was not the righteous heat of someone with a grievance to resolve, which was useful in the short term and volatile in the long term. It was something colder and more patient and more completely directional than either. It was the look of a man who had decided, with the same thoroughness he apparently applied to everything else, that he had found the thing he was built for.
Davies stamped the intake form. He did it with the slightly too-deliberate motion of someone performing a bureaucratic act while thinking something they hadn't decided yet whether to write down.
"Report to Catterick," Davies said. "First of February."
The young man stood, collected his folder, and buttoned his coat. He nodded once — not grateful, not relieved, but the nod of someone confirming an arrangement they had been expecting to confirm.
He walked out. The door closed behind him with the ordinary sound of an ordinary door.
Davies sat at his desk for a moment. He looked at the name on the intake form.
Alen Richard.
He opened his drawer, took out the small notebook he kept for observations he didn't know how to categorize, and he wrote three words in it.
Already at war.
∗ ∗ ∗
ACT TWO: THE MAKING OF A PHANTOM
2002 – 2006
You do not become a weapon by choosing to.
You become a weapon by allowing the world to sharpen you long enough.