Prologue The Island A man dressed in tattered rags sprinted headlong through a tropical rainforest. Drenched in sweat, bare feet pounding the uneven ground, he pushed through the broad green leaves and charted a path higher. Upward, toward a peak he couldn''t see, but believed he would reach. Finding a more open trail, he paused near a tangled bush covered in colorful flowers. His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath. He wiped the sweat from his brow and smacked the side of his neck as a biting insect landed. Pulling his hand away revealed a smear of his own blood, which only partially covered the tattoo on his neck, displaying numbers and letters in an odd code-like arrangement. The last two digits were an offset one and zero.
Because of this he was called Deci. Wiping the blood off, Deci glanced back into the foliage, looking for the others, who were falling behind. "Come on," he shouted. "Keep moving." A group of younger men appeared. They resembled him in skin tone and facial features, appearing so similar to one another it was hard to tell them apart. Their clothes were as ragged and dirty as his, and fear streaked their faces. They pushed through, looking to him.
"Are you sure this is the right way?" In truth he wasn''t, but he''d been told he would find a trail, and here it was. He pointed along the path. "To the top. Go quickly." "And then what?" one of the younger men asked. "Escape," he said. "Freedom." These words landed flat with the younger men.
They almost seemed confused. But the sound of dogs barking shook them out of their stupor. The hunters were coming; they''d picked up the trail and there was no chance of them losing it now. Not with so many of them pushing through the trees, sweating like beasts of burden. "Go, go, go," Deci shouted. The young ones took off again, followed at the last by another man, who was as old as their leader. He stopped and crouched near the bush. At a distance the two men appeared almost identical, but Deci''s sunken eyes, gaunt cheeks, and scared face showed how their lives had diverged.
"Brother," the second man said. "They have us. We should turn back before it''s too late." "It''s already too late," Deci replied. "Our only hope lies ahead." "On the cliffs? What are we supposed to do? Jump?" "A way will be revealed," the leader insisted. "She promised us." A look of irritation crossed the second man''s face.
"She has never been seen. She''s just a whisper in our minds." "She gave us this," Deci insisted, grasping a necklace that lay heavy against his chest. It was bulky and heavy and made of electronic parts and batteries. He wore it as if it were a talisman of great power. "The necklace cannot deflect bullets," the second man said, "or stop a dog from biting. And blind faith is for fools." "Then turn back," Deci said.
"But I will not let them do to the younger ones what they''ve done to us." The two men stared at each other for a long moment. They''d had this argument before. The deadlock ended as a gunshot rang out from below. Both men flinched and ducked and then turned for the trail together, sprinting up the path in bare and bloody feet. "You''d better be right," the second man said. "Or this is the only freedom we''ll ever know." The two men scrambled up the trail, ignorant of the tracks they were making in the dirt and the bloody footprints left on the steep rock faces.
When they pushed through the last wall of tangled brush and arrived out into the open, they found themselves atop a rocky bluff, high above the sea. By now the sun was low on the horizon, the ocean waves shimmered in bronze and gray. A cool breeze drew the sweat off their bodies while the sound of crashing waves echoed up from below. The young men were staring. "I see forever," one of them said. "How do we go?" another asked. The leader looked around. He saw no sign of rescue.
No sign of help. Maybe they were supposed to jump. He stepped to the edge and looked down. Piles of rocks made up a jagged shoreline two hundred feet below. They stuck out too far from the base of the cliff to imagine one could reach the water. Even if they could jump far enough to make the water''s edge, they would die broken and battered after plunging through the shallows and hitting the rocks. Stepping back from the edge, Deci shuddered. He''d led them to their doom.
He suddenly wished he wasn''t the leader. Wished even more intensely that he''d never received the message or been given the necklace. And then he saw something that gave him hope. A knotted line had been anchored to the side of the cliff. It dropped down thirty feet, where a weighted end hung loosely. It looked as though the rope hung in front of an opening in the side of the cliff. A way out. He had been promised a way out.
He had no experience in such things, but he quickly saw the drawback to using it: if he could see it, so could the hunters. He removed the necklace and placed it over the head of his brother. "Climb down." His brother looked down at the rope and the rocks far beneath it. He shook his head. "Go," Deci insisted. "Lead them." "No," he said.
"You take them. I have no faith." Deci grasped his brother by the arm and drug him to the edge of the cliff. Reaching over, he managed to grasp the rope. He pulled on it to test the security, then placed it in his brother''s hands. "She promised a way out. This is it. Now go!" Pushing through the jungle, a half mile behind the group of escapees, a tall Caucasian man with a bald head and narrow, hawkish eyes found himself enjoying the hunt.
Dressed in khakis and a safari vest, he carried two pistols on separate belts and walked with a shotgun in his hands. On the island he was known as the Overseer, but at previous stops in his life he''d been a big-game hunter, a trail boss in some of the toughest parts of the world, and a mercenary for hire to anyone with the right denominations of currency. Here on the island, he found himself grinning as the dogs locked in on the scent and pulled hard against their leads. He laughed as the handlers struggled to keep up, holding the animals back and hacking their way through the brush with machetes. "Run them down," the Overseer growled with a demented sense of glee. "If even one man escapes, each of you will suffer the punishment meant for them." If his men needed any more motivation, this was enough. They pushed on, climbing higher and moving faster as the foliage thinned.
Before long they were tracking bloody, scuffling footprints imprinted by raw, uncovered feet. It made the trail easy to follow, but left the Overseer wondering about the course they''d chosen. Previous escapees had always run for the other side of the island, fleeing the civilized but prisonlike compound in hopes of surviving in the rocky, volcanic wasteland. These men were taking a different path. One that kept them away from the dividing wall and its razor wire and cameras. It was curious, he thought, but it didn''t matter much. Soon they''d be trapped between the dogs and the cliffside. The dogs began yelping more intensely.
They smelled the quarry up ahead. "Let them go," the Overseer shouted. The handlers dropped their leashes and the dogs shot forward. They rushed upward and vanished from sight, a lethal pack only a fraction removed from the wolves they were descended from. The Overseer picked up his pace, eager to watch the animals do their job. He arrived at a small clearing to find the animals running in circles, sniffing the ground and then raising their snouts to howl at the sky. The trail had come to an end, but there was no one to be found. A branch creaked behind him, and the Overseer turned in time to see a figure leaping down toward him.
The barefoot man hit him, knocking him to the ground and rolling free. Both men jumped up, and the dogs spun around as if to set upon the attacker. "Stay!" the Overseer shouted at them in a deep, commanding voice. The dogs heeled and stood stiffly. The Overseer aimed the shotgun at the dirty, bleeding man. "Where are the others?" he demanded. "Tell me now and I''ll show you mercy." The escapee was thin.
The shredded clothes hanging on him like rags. Living in the bush for weeks would do that to a person. He stepped back nervously, looking from side to side. From the waistband of his threadbare pants he pulled a homemade knife. It was nothing more than a length of thick fabric wrapped around a sharpened flint. "You''ve made yourself a weapon," the Overseer noted. "How interesting. We didn''t teach you that.
Maybe you vermin learn faster than we''ve been told to expect." The Overseer tossed the shotgun aside and took a machete from one of his men. "Let''s see how well you use it." He stepped forward, but Deci threw a handful of dirt in his face. The Overseer squinted against the attack, suffering the sting of the grit with eyes open as he slashed with the machete. It grazed Deci''s chest deep enough to draw a line of blood, but the mark was no more than a flesh wound. He had suffered worse than that in the rooms. Deci glanced at the blood on his chest and shrugged it off.
He circled to the right and then back, holding the knife toward the Overseer and then pointing it at the nearest of his men. "Don''t worry abo.