THE SELECTION

THE NINE is a completed five-book sequence. This is Book Two in the main sequence.

Fourteen shipping notices concerning the Strait of Hormuz. Each one carries a field headed CAUSE. Each field is empty. Under each empty field, in six-point type, is the word optional.

Peter Steele is sixty-two and has written single-page briefs for forty years. He has checked the record: four thousand two hundred and forty-four briefs, six hundred and twelve of them his, and not one of them ever returned with a question. He is not a hero. He does not become one.

He fills in a form.

Nine working days later a clerk in Richmond types nine words into a box that has been empty since August. The nine words are dull, ordinary and completely true — and they do not match the other thirteen. That mismatch is the whole difference between a conspiracy and an architecture, and Peter is the only person alive who has looked at it.

It costs him a line on a register in a building he has never been inside. Thirty people have paid that price in ten years. His is the thirty-first.

Meanwhile a war-risk premium that has sat at 0.028 percent for two years has begun, very slightly, to move. His wife has brought three appointments forward and explained none of them. And his son’s medical record has an eighteen-month gap in it that was not there in September.

THE SELECTION is about what happens to a competent, unremarkable man at the moment the system he works inside stops being indifferent to him and starts being interested.

Book Two of THE NINE — a completed sequence of four contemporary novels and one history. Each is built to be read on its own.