The Heaven Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

passage to America during the Second World War, his father had never had the opportunity, much less the means to leave Botany Street.
    Oh, he’d talked about it enough, all the time in fact. Sitting on the shredded brown lounger after a long day shoveling coal, in front of a black-and-white television that managed one fuzzy channel. On a good day he might have a generic beer on his lap. “I tell you, Buckwheat (his dad always called him Buckwheat), I swear I’ll take us out of here one day. My folks didn’t come two thousand miles on a boat to live like rabbits in someone’s play box. No sir.” And for a while Kent had believed him.
    But his dad had never managed that journey beyond Botany Street. By the time Kent was in sixth grade he knew that if he ever wanted a life remotely similar to Jesse Owens’s or even the average American’s, for that matter, it would be solely up to him. And from what he could see there were only two ways to acquire a ticket for the train leaving their miserable station in life. The one ticket was pure, unsolicited fortune—winning the lottery, say, or finding a bag of cash—a prospect he quickly decided was preposterous. And the other ticket was high achievement. Super high achievement. The kind of achievement that landed people Super Bowl rings, or championship belts, or in his case, scholarships.
    Beginning in grade seven he divided the sum total of his time between three pursuits. Surviving—that would be eating and sleeping and washing behind the ears now and then; running, which he still did every single day; and studying. For several hours each night he read everything he could get his spindly fingers on. In tenth grade he got a library card to the Kansas City Municipal Library, a building he figured had about every book ever written about anything. Never mind that it was a five-mile run from Botany Street; he enjoyed running anyway.
    It all paid off for him one afternoon, three months after his father’s death, in a single white envelope sticking out of their mail slot. He’d torn the letter out with trembling fingers, and there it was: a full academic scholarship to Colorado State University. He was leaving Stupid Street!
    Some came to characterize him as a genius during his six years of higher education. In reality, his success was due much more to long hard hours with his nose in the books than to overactive gray matter.
    The sweet smell of success. Yes indeed, and today, finally, success was his.
    Kent walked into the hall. The back foyer was empty when he entered. Normally Norma would be sitting at the switchboard, punching buttons. Beyond her station the wide hall continued to a series of administrative divisions, each housing a suite of offices. At the hall’s end, an elevator rose to three additional floors of the same. Floors four through twenty were serviced by a different elevator used by the tenants.
    Kent’s eyes fixed on the first door, ahead to his right, shadowed in the hall’s fluorescent light. Bold, white antique letters labeled the division: Information Systems Division. Behind that door lay a small reception room and four offices. The spawning ground for Advanced Funds Processing System. His life. The division could have been placed anywhere—in a basement bunker, for all that mattered. It had little to do with the Denver branch specifically and was in fact only one of a dozen similar divisions hammering out the bank’s software across the globe. Part of Niponbank’s decentralization policy.
    Kent walked quickly down the hall and opened the door.
    His four coworkers stood in the small lobby outside of their offices, waiting for him.
    “Kent! It’s about time you joined us, boy!” Markus Borst beamed. His boss held a champagne glass brimming with amber liquid. A large, hooked nose gave him the appearance of a penguin. A bald penguin at that.
    The redhead, Todd Brice, pushed his oversized torso from the sofa and grinned wide. “It’s about time,