PROLOGUE
✦ ✦ ✦
LET ME TELL you a story about a grave.
The lone man was placing a bouquet beside a gravestone. No name was inscribed upon the stone, only the words IN MEMORY OF A PATRIOT WHO SAVED THE WORLD.
This was, after all, a cemetery for the unknown. For those whose names could not be determined. For those whose identities were not permitted to be recorded.
White flowers carpeted the cemetery grounds. Their name, the star-of-Bethlehem, evoked the light of the kingdom of God. (Also, a moniker shared with the trinket placed atop Christmas trees.)
But the graves in this potter’s field belonged to those cast out from the light of heaven.
Do you know why graveyards for the nameless are called potter’s fields? The answer can be found within the book of Matthew. A repentant Judas brought back his thirty pieces of silver to the Jewish priests, but the priests turned him away. Said it was his own problem, not theirs.
Judas threw the silver coins to the temple floor, left, and hanged himself. The priests used the blood money to buy a field from a potter, which they turned into a graveyard for the travelers, for the exiled, and for the abandoned.
A graveyard funded by Judas’s betrayal.
And so graveyards for the nameless are called potter’s fields.
The True Patriot, exiled, her name stolen, her remains lost, left nothing behind but her gravestone. The stars-of-Bethlehem, virtuous and white, seemed to stand in memory of the grave’s owner.
The Joy. That was her name.
She loved her country more than anyone, and her country was always in her thoughts. And yet, this proud, beautiful woman was exiled, buried here, and stripped of her name. By all rights, The Joy’s remains should have been properly laid to rest at Arlington, not abandoned in distant Russia.
At the site of that same grave, fifty years earlier, another man’s battle began.
Oddly enough, he too had placed a bouquet on her gravesite. It was a half a century ago—back when Russia was still called the Soviet Union, when the Soviets and the Americans threatened global destruction again and again, playing at their perilous staring contest with enough nuclear ordnance pointed at each other to destroy the world many times over and still have some to spare. The stars-of-Bethlehem had not yet taken root when the man stood there, motionless, his head tilted back to keep his tears from spilling. With that sorrow, that lonesome tableau, numerous battles were to begin.
No one knows the real name of The True Patriot.
The Joy had many names—“The Boss,” “The Mother of Special Forces,” and in Russia, “Voyevoda,” meaning “Warlord.” These were but a small sample, but the one name the man had never been able to learn was that given to her by her parents.
The man standing at her grave had once been known as “Snake.”
To state it more accurately, he had been one of the Snakes.
The story I have to tell is about these Snakes.
One tried to change the world. One tried to destroy it. One tried to protect it. There were many Snakes, and there were many battles.
I want to tell you.
I want to tell you how our world came to be what it is.
I want to tell you the story of the Snakes who shaped the world.