Chapter 1: LEAVING THE NEST

The day Mascha left for University was the most relieved Jack Ryan had felt in over a decade.

It had begun innocuously enough. Mascha had predictably lagged on packing up all of her things, and the onus fell upon Jack to help her find her teddy bear.

"Times like this I wish Sarah or Caroline were still around," Jack grunted, sifting through a collapsed heap of comic books splayed out at the foot of Mascha's bed. "They kept you responsible. Never known a lady to be such a slob."

"I feel like you're insulting me."

"I'm just telling it how it is," Jack said. He pushed aside a stack of Batman trades to reveal a patch of carpet inundated with a rainbow of solidified molten candy. A cavalcade of bent and browning lollipop sticks rose from the disgusting mass like an assembly of tombstones. "Mascha, what the hell?"

She eyed the cause of his concern quizzically. "There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Oh, and language, Dad." She wagged her finger at Jack for emphasis.

"Mascha…what the hell?"

And so it went. Jack liked the banality of parenthood. It was comfortable and easy, and when Mascha disappeared down the street in the shitty old Toyota he had bought for her the week prior, he couldn't help but think,

She's gonna drive that thing straight through the wall of an Arby's.

Then, of course,

Yeah. I did okay.

The moment passed, the surge of pride gone as quickly as it had come, and he found himself sitting on the porch of his modest two-story suburban palace, sucking down the smoke of an imported cigarette and gazing up at the setting sun.

Whatever elation the day had brought him had dissipated entirely with the setting of the sun. Storm clouds moved in under cover of darkness, smothering the starlight. The first drop of rain fell upon the tip of his nose, and the next two right in the center of his left eye, eliciting an emphatic "Fuck…Fucking shit!" when he dropped his cigarette between the steps of the porch.

A van pulled up in front of his house. Jack stared at it quizzically, dismissing its presence as that of some wayward idiot lost in the labyrinthine mystery of an American suburb, until five minutes had passed and he realized that the driver intended to idle there for an indefinite period of time.

"I should call the police," Jack muttered.

Instead he descended the porch and picked up a large rock at the base of the tree dominating his front yard. With the grace and majesty of a powerful tiger, he walked up to the idling van and rapped his knuckles against the passenger side window, large rock hidden behind his back.

He waited.

He tried again.

That was the limit of Jack Ryan's patience.

"Roll down the fucking window!" he growled, pounding on the tinted glass.

The window rolled down excruciatingly slowly, the automatic mechanism failing a quarter into the process. Jack could see the slightest sliver of dirty blonde hair. The mysterious head jerked up suddenly, revealing a set of striking green eyes. The long eyelashes and delicate eyebrows led him to believe it was a woman, but then Jack had also known Sander Cohen.

"I can't. It's stuck," said the mysterious person with a vague Eastern European lilt. Yes, Jack thought. Definitely a lady.

"Push down the window," drawled a man with astoundingly clear diction.

"I am a weak woman with the proportionate strength of a disabled infant," sniffed the woman. "Jack Ryan, be a darling and do it for me."

Jack was inclined at that point not to listen, thinking it prudent not to leave his fingertips at the mercy of the unusual pair, and was about to vocalize his thoughts before the man chuckled.

"Jack Ryan, would you kindly drop that rock and push down the window?"

The compulsion struck him like a rocketized train. Nobody fucking uses that phrase, Jack thought. He wasn't the sharpest of crayons, being rather like the red crayon that everybody used and abused like a skilled whore in elementary school, and it took him a minute before he realized that probably the man used the phrase deliberately, and probably there was some risky business about to go down.

Jack dropped the rock and gripped the edge of the glass with a trembling hand. He forced it down into the rubber window trim and narrowed his eyes when he finally took a long, hard look at the denizens of the van.

The man behind the wheel was conventionally handsome, with a cleft chin, a fine head of hoary hair, and baby blue eyes that made Jack want to trust him. He wore a simple white shirt and faded blue jeans. He resembled what Jack had imagined Atlas to look like, once upon a time in his brain.

The woman was beefy, a massive rhinoceros of a bird wrapped in a leopard print hooker jacket, with massive arms that were surely capable of crushing Jack's trachea with minimal effort. There was a half-finished power bar gripped in the woman's mighty right hand. She made Jack distinctly uncomfortable. He had never liked lady bodybuilders, partially because he considered them hideous, unthinkable people, and partially because they made him feel like less of a man.

The man coughed. "Jack, would you kindly get into the back, refrain from assaulting us, and sit quietly while we explain the situation to you?"

Jack complied, but made a point of not buckling his seat belt.

The van took off, burning rubber as the fiery v8 engine combusted at a massive rate, sending power to the ground beneath the wheels.

The woman nodded.

"We know full well you are capable of overcoming your W-Y-K conditioning should you have reasonable motivation to resist. But that's okay. We are going to kill all of your children if you do not comply with our demands."

Jack blinked. "Excuse me?"

The burly woman explained how they had moles inserted into the teaching staff of the universities that his daughters were attending, and Jack felt his blood both boil and chill as he realized the implications.

This organization was powerful, Jack thought.

"What do you want from me?"

Jack couldn't fathom what they wanted from him. He had spent the last fifteen years accomplishing little more than burglarizing enough homes to keep his children clothed and fed, and pounding cold ones every Friday.

The repulsive woman noticeably erected in her seat, twisting her head to regard Jack with solemnity. "Our organization wishes to enact change in this world on a global scale. Until this point, we have not had the means to do so. Tell me, are you familiar with the International Order of the Pawns?"

Jack, with the insight of a magician, saw through the pitiable attempt at misdirection. "Can we go back to the thing about murdering my kids?"

"Ah yes," said the man. He jerks his head at the car phone installed in the dashboard. "I don't think there's too much to explain about that. I make a quick call, and that precious family you've spent your life cultivating is gone. Poof. Kablammo. Done and done."

Jack wanted to kill these fuckers, but he remained a cool customer and affected an aloof air.

"We've been investigating Rapture for quite some years. Andrew Ryan's plan was not particularly subtle since a core component of it was vanishing everyone good at their job around the globe. It boggles my mind to think of just how many years he's set back the progress of mankind as a whole."

Jack narrowed his eyes. "So what does any of this have to do with me?"

The man sighed. "You know, I don't like your belligerency. We aren't bad people, Jack. I know what you need."

The van parked in front of a dive bar. The unlikely trio exited the vehicle while the rain pounded a funky beat upon the surface of their hair. The titanic woman held the door open for Jack, wanting desperately for him to accept her as an actual person, but it was a fool's errand. Having been dehumanized all throughout childhood and most of her professional adult life, she was familiar with Jack's vibe. They sat down at the bar and the man hailed the bartender.

"Johnathan, can you pour a fine brew for my friend here?"

The bartender said yes, and Jack was clearly aware that the bartender was eyeing him like he was the prize puppy at a dog swapping convention, because the bartender was a homosexual.

"Yes," stage whispered the bartender huskily. He set about pouring about Jack a fine, heady brew, a deep brown nectar promising tantalizing hazelnut flavor with subtle caramel tones. Yes, thought Jack as he imbibed the beer, perhaps this makes this situation acceptable.

"Jack, do you have sympathy for Native Americans? Those wonderful indigenous people whose land we unjustly took when we slaughtered them on the battlefield?"

"Yes," said Jack.

The man's lips thinned into a grim line. "We've been hearing rumblings that the President is about to enact some domestic policies that will vastly reduce the quality of life of everyone on the reservations. We need to assassinate the President in broad daylight in order to divert attention away from the Native Americans and get this country rolling on the right path, and you're just the man for the job."

Jack shook his head. "I'm just a man. That's impossible."

The man and disgusting woman shared a sly look.

"I believe your family has a history of choosing the impossible."

The man pulled out a glowing blue ampoule and jammed it into Jack's wrist, sending a mean force of pleasurable euphoria spreading through his veins. Jack could only compare it to chasing the dragon after a long night unloading trucks at the 7/11. A bolt of striking lightning burst forth from the charismatic fist of Jack's arm, singeing the fine oak counter of the bar. The bartender told himself not to freak out, praying that someone was getting the police, because he didn't want to.

In a burst of pain, Jack's hand was pitted with a hodgepodge of yonic crevasses, from which erupted a wicked swarm of bees that screamed into the stratosphere of the bar, harassing the patrons with promises of venomous strings. The terror that the patrons had been harboring in their breasts blossomed into full blown panic much like breast cancer starts from tiny genetic irregularities, and the rohypnol that the men had been saving for the women instead found homes in the manly gullets of the amorous gentlemen.

Jack gripped his beer tightly.

He suddenly remembered.

It was Friday.

He threw back his head and proceeded to pound the cold one, veins sparking red and blue lightning.

The man and the feminine ogre could not even begin to fathom what unfathomable events they had just set into motion. Would they regret it? They don't know. Much like most people, they lived for witnessing radical business, but what mankind at large considered radical and what Jack Ryan considered radical were as far apart as a tiger and her verbally abusive mother.

"Are you okay?" asked the unfortunate female birth.

"Dandy," growled Jack.