Born to Run Read online

  A note from the publisher

  Dear Reader,

  If you enjoy riveting stories with engaging characters and strong writing as I do, you’ll love Born to Run. It’s an edge-of-your-seat political thriller, action packed with terrorism… treason… and murder. It follows a nation’s desire for Isabel Diaz to be the first Hispanic and female president… but can she win? And should she? I couldn’t put it down… Born to Run is a gripping read. Born to Run is John’s second novel.

  Did you know that big-name authors, John Grisham and J.K. Rowling, were rejected many times by publishers? John Green’s own experience of this was one of the many factors that inspired Pantera Press, and our aim to become a great new home for Australia’s next generation of best-loved authors. We think we’re well on our way.

  But there’s even more to us… Simply by enjoying our books, you’ll also be contributing to our unique approach: good books doing good thingsTM. We have a strong ‘profits for philanthropy’ foundation, focussed on literacy, quality writing, the joys of reading and fostering debate.

  So let me mention one program we’re thrilled to support: Let’s Read. It’s already helping 100,000 pre-schoolers across Australia develop a love of books and the building blocks for learning how to read and write. We’re excited that Let’s Read now also operates in remote Indigenous communities in Far North Queensland, Cape York and Torres Strait. Let’s Read was developed by the Centre for Community Child Health and it’s being implemented in partnership with The Smith Family.

  Simply buying this book will help us support these kids. Thank you.

  Want to do more? If you visit www.PanteraPress.com/Donate you can personally donate to help The Smith Family expand Let’s Read, find out more about this great program, and also more on the other programs Pantera Press supports.

  Please enjoy Born to Run.

  And for news about our other books, sample chapters, author interviews and much more, please visit out website: www.PanteraPress.com

  Happy reading,

  Alison Green

  First published in 2011 by Pantera Press Pty Limited

  www.PanteraPress.com

  Text Copyright © John M. Green, 2011

  John M. Green has asserted his moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.

  Design and Typography Copyright © Pantera Press Pty Limited, 2011

  PanteraPress, the three-slashed colophon device, good books doing good things, a great new home for Australia’s next generation of best-loved authors, WHY vs WHY, and making sense of everything are trademarks of Pantera Press Pty Limited.

  This book is copyright, and all rights are reserved.

  We welcome your support of the author’s rights, so please only buy authorised editions. This is a work of fiction, though it is based on some real events. Names, characters, organisations, dialogue and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, firms, events or locales is coincidental.

  Without the publisher’s prior written permission, and without limiting the rights reserved under copyright, none of this book may be scanned, reproduced, stored in, uploaded to or introduced into a retrieval or distribution system, including the internet, or transmitted, copied or made available in any form or by and means (including digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, sound or audio recording, or text-to-voice). This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent recipient.

  Please send all permission queries to:

  Pantera Press, P.O. Box 1989 Neutral Bay, NSW Australia 2089 or [email protected]

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

  ISBN 978-0-9807418-8-9

  eBook ISBN 978-1-9219970-2-0

  Cover and Internal Design: Luke Causby, Blue Cork

  Cover Image: © iStockphoto.com/Roger Zambrana

  Author Photo: Courtesy, Phil Carrick, The Australian Financial Review

  Typesetting by Kirby Jones

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  Pantera Press policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  To my three amigos

  “When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become president. I’m beginning to believe it.”

  — Clarence Darrow, defence attorney and writer (1857–1938)

  “Can a woman be president of the United States?

  At present the answer is emphatically ‘No’.”

  — Eleanor Roosevelt, “Women in Politics”

  (Good Housekeeping, 1940)

  “Yes, absolutely. I think, you know, because why not?”

  — Arnold Schwarzenegger on allowing foreign-born Americans to run for president (60 Minutes, 2004)

  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.”

  — Thomas Jefferson (1787)

  CONTENTS

  THE FINISH LINE…

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  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  NOWHERE MAN

  1

  BOOKCLUBS

  LET’S READ

  ABOUT JOHN M. GREEN

  Praise for Born to Run

  Praise for Nowhere Man

  THE FINISH LINE…

  FOR ONCE, HILLARY Clinton and Sarah Palin are in synch, privately spitting their venom at the cloying barrage of TV images that show a beaming Isabel Diaz sprinkling her pixie dust. Even their own supporters, in a distressing groundswell these two political foes once craved for themselves, are leaping to their feet across the country, punching the air and chanting “Bel… Bel… Isa-bel.”

  As the race to win the White House hurtles into its final straight, candidate Isabel Diaz streaks lengths ahead. “She’s not only smart, persona
ble and visionary, she’s got an impressive record of accomplishment,” The New York Times. “The nation, and the world, will be well-served if this woman occupies the Oval Office.”

  Diaz’s well-chronicled slog to success is tunnelling her deep into the nation’s psyche, making it very tough for her opponents. It’s hardly wise politics to slam a minority woman who crawled out of a rank pit of poverty, alcohol and violence to emerge as the big-hearted owner of an admired family restaurant chain, and an active philanthropist to boot. What little mud her rivals have been able to dig up and toss at her isn’t sticking.

  It’s true that some see her as too good to be true, but for most, in a nation deflated after so many pumped up promises of change, Isabel Diaz offers a credible breath of fresh air.

  On policy, not only has she won over the Democratic heartland for her stance on moral issues, offers of relief for the middle class, and her doable list of programs of leg-ups for the underdog, but the Tea Party also loves her for promising low taxes, small government and family values. Her running mate, the more traditionally conservative Hank Clemens who hails from North Carolina, helps her shore up the religious right.

  The media are chorusing that Isabel Diaz is a shoo-in, and that her rival Robert (Bobby) J. Foster is outfoxed and outpaced.

  Buoyed for weeks with a 70-percent approval rating—higher than the rapture for Barack Obama at his peak—the presidency is within Isabel’s grasp.

  And deep behind the scenes, a shadowy circle of zealots is conspiring to guarantee just that.

  1

  JAX MASON HAD heard of Isabel Diaz. Who didn’t know about the famous Burger Queen? But the twenty-five-year-old Australian had no clue he was about to sacrifice his life for her.

  Bent over tying his laces, his shoe on his skateboard and his fringe flopped over his glasses, he heard the elevator ping and, at 5 AM, he thought it had to be the night guard doing his final rounds. Jax looked up, expecting that at any second the doors would slide open on the old guy’s barrel stomach and customary can of Pepsi Max.

  Though Jax was currently visiting London from New York, where he rented an apartment, he really lived on the internet. He was a prolific contributor to WikiLeaks (though he’d never actually met Julian Assange), as well as Anonymous and various conspiracy theory sites. His thick Coke-bottle glasses exaggerated his nerdiness and helped him suit the label of the typical young math genius, though it was called maths where he was born, in Melbourne. His straggly brown hair was so greasy it looked black even in a good light, and his pasty skin was proof he was a night-owl, especially with his skateboarding. Neither travel nor late nights troubled him. Jax was not big on mixing with other people and even dismissed “social networking” as an ironic misnomer. His computer was his closest companion, closely followed by his skateboard. The only thing neat about him was his beard, a slightly ginger mouse-tail that made him look as though an amber exclamation mark was pointing under his lip.

  If the Silicon Valley environmental software firm that had flown him to the UK had bothered with a face-to-face interview, they would have had second thoughts. Instead, they hired him on the strength of a single phone call after hearing of his reputation from his PhD work, even though it was unfinished. He’d dumped Princeton University and skipped to New York as a contractor, mainly so he could work on his pet project away from the prying eyes of deceitful supervisors. Like the creep Jax had overheard in the hallway mocking his stutter.

  His current employers had installed their patented software for running the environmental features of a new five-star-rated building at Canary Wharf, London’s modern financial district, but due to a serious systems glitch the local authorities were refusing to hand over their completion certificate so none of the tenants could move in. Jax was over here to fix it. “Don’t leave the building till it’s done,” was his simple brief, but it was one he ignored daily, stealing a few hours here and there to take in the sights since he hadn’t been to London before.

  He flicked back his hair but, from out here on the terrace across the empty blacked-out floor, all he could make out was the elevator’s flashing “14”. He squinted, and when the doors shushed open, two occupants stepped out, not one. With the light behind them, he couldn’t glimpse their faces but neither of their body shapes was anything like the nightwatchman’s. Jax’s smile dropped, sending a glint of reflected moonlight from his lenses to the visitors.

  “Jax Mason, is that you over there?”

  She was British, Jax decided, hardly surprised. He couldn’t make out the badge she seemed to be waving in front of her, but her confident strides toward him and her, but her confident strides toward him and her stubby companion’s menacing swagger instantly made Jax’s skin crawl, and his head suddenly squirmed with the thought that 14th floors were usually 13ths.

  A frosty wind blew up from the River Thames two hundred feet below, though he wondered if it was nerves.

  “Jax Mason?” she insisted.

  “Yeah, that’s m-me. Y-you?” Jax tried to calm the anxiety trembling out of him. He stammered at the best of times, though this didn’t seem like one of them. He took her hand, but her sneer suggested he should have gripped it harder, or maybe first wiped the sweat off his own hand on his jeans. She was an eyeful, for sure, but that only increased Jax’s edginess. He wasn’t good around women. Or men. But especially women.

  “I’m Diana Hunter,” she lied and, tilting her head toward her slightly hunch-backed colleague, continued, “And this is Lucky.”

  Even in this dim light, Jax noted that Lucky’s face looked like he shaved with a chisel, possibly why he had the chipped front tooth.

  “We’re MI6,” Diana explained, brushing back a strand of her blonde hair, but not so far back that Jax could have guessed it was a wig, even in good light.

  2

  MI6 WAS THE UK’s secret intelligence service; Jax knew that. When he’d goofed off on a River Thames tourist cruise three days earlier, the loudspeaker commentary had specifically pointed out MI6’s building. Some secret service, he’d smirked at the time.

  As Diana kept a grip on Jax’s hand, her piercing brown eyes bored into him so long he noticed that one of her contact lenses was askew. If the lights had been on, he might have detected that her real eye-colour was blue.

  He coughed as an excuse to remove his hand from hers. “Like, wh-what do you guys want?” he stuttered, mainly out of habit and not entirely from fear. Where, Jax sweated, was actor Geoffrey Rush when he needed him, or better than Rush, a real speech therapist?

  “Mr Mason. Recently you posted a blog about your subway shockwave simulation.” Jax had posted several blogs on the web about his intricate computer model, boasting it was mathematical proof that terrorists could build up and hurtle a shockwave through a city’s subway system that was so ferocious it could suck down and destroy the entire metropolis above it. All they needed to know was precisely on which platforms to set off a hair-trigger-timed series of relatively small explosions.

  As Jax gripped the terrace railing, the cold metal drew the remaining heat out of him. Months ago, he had contacted the US government about his computer model, a radical step for an anarchist like him. But Homeland Security flicked him straight into crackpot corner. He tried to tell them: if Jax Mason working alone could create something like this, what could more malign parties do? But if the US government wouldn’t listen, why was MI6 popping up out of the blue?

  As if she could read his mind, Diana answered his question, “The Prime Minister is acutely sensitive after the bombings over here. He wants you to help us design baffles for London’s Tube to prevent one of these shockwaves. For a considerable retainer, of course.”

  They were going to pay him? Working for the government? Normally that would be against his principles, but this wasn’t his government, nor even his adopted government… and then there was the money.

  He shifted his gaze from Diana to the other spook, but only for a second, chilled by the stare penetrati
ng him from Lucky’s pencil-points. Lucky usually didn’t say much, words not being his preferred tools of persuasion. While Jax didn’t know that, he somehow sensed that any hand big enough to crush his skull by itself would do Lucky’s speaking for him.

  “I’m s-sort of busy. I’m here on a j-job,” Jax muttered, looking at his shoes and reminding himself he had been about to tie his lace.

  “Six hours ago,” said Diana, shaking her head slowly, “we intercepted an encrypted satellite communication and only finished unscrambling it an hour ago. The point, sir, is that you are in immediate danger—from a terrorist cell here in London. We are not the only ones seeking your simulation model. We know these other people, Mr Mason, and they are not the types to let anything, or anyone, stand in their way. We need to get you, and your model, to safety. Now.”

  That she whispered this only made Jax jumpier. “How l-long we g-got?” he said, not that he had a hectic day of meetings to reschedule.

  Without answering, she pulled him inside, off the terrace. “Mr Mason. May I call you Jax?”

  He nodded dumbly.

  “Jax. Your software program? The simulation? Before we leave here, we must isolate and protect all copies in existence. We have people on standby.”

  “Over th-there,” he said.

  Her eyes followed his to where his laptop was on the floor, next to his backpack. “Show me,” she said, guiding him over to it.

  Jax sat cross-legged in front of the screen, and she gripped his shoulder. On-screen, he clicked an icon and a menu popped up offering three choices: London, New York City and Washington.

  “Trash it.”

  He did.

  “How many other copies are there?”

  Jax hesitated, but her grip tightened.

  “There’s o-one in my b-backpack.”

  After ferreting inside the bag, Lucky handed a DVD box to Jax, who flicked through them and pulled out the relevant disk.

  “Any others?”

  Jax slowly shook his head and, as his situation sank in, so did the rest of his body.