There was a sharp pain at the back of his head. Stars exploding behind his eyes. A flash of sudden, stark memory.

Darkness. Then light.

They were all above him, faces cast in silhouette. Behind them loomed the vast orange sky.

And he remembered nearly all of them. Those he didn't recognize, he knew he had never met before. He knew. Remembered everything. And it was wrong.

Before losing consciousness once more, he murmured something to those kneeling above him. A single word. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he was gone.

Guiltily, his daughter cradled his head in her hands, less concerned with her father's health than with what her mother would do when she got back home.

"What did he say?" a Secret Service agent asked, unhappy with himself for not being more firm with the daughter of his charge.

"I don't know," his partner said.

"It sounded like 'cure,'" a photographer whispered.

"Cure? What do you suppose he meant?"

The photographer shrugged. "Who knows with Alzheimer's?" he said.

For an eternity on that dusty California desert bluff, with a soft breeze blowing down from the Santa Ana Mountains, everyone stood around in shock, not knowing what to do.

They looked down on the tired, weathered face of the former President of the United States, little realizing that their unauthorized stunt had unlocked a decades-old secret so dangerous it could very well topple the government of the nation he had served so well.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and from where he was standing he couldn't see a single pitchfork or burning torch.

There were no chants. No banners, per se. A few signs here and there, but these were feeble at best. The only real effort shown by the protestors was their jockeying attempts to get their faces in front of the many television cameras that whirred up at them from the sidewalk.