V was a precocious child. By the time he was six, he was reading at a seventh-grade level, much to the amazement of his teachers in rural Louisiana. “They decided I was just the most wonderful curiosity since Edwin Merrick,” he says. His report cards were a source of great pride for his father, who rewarded him with hang gliding lessons in first grade. “We’ve got pictures of me in a hang gliding harness. It’s about nine sizes too big [with] double weights on the hang glider bar to, as the instructor put it, keep me from being blown away to France,” recalls V. “It’s actually one of my most treasured memories.”

But his father’s expectations would only grow with time. “He started talking more and more about positioning me as some sort of revolutionary leadership figure,” says V. He had V read the first book in the Dune series, but he forbade him from reading the rest of the series. He didn’t want the boy to know that the charismatic leader Paul Atreides eventually becomes a dictator in his own right. “You hear about young kids getting recruited into terrorist organizations with songs and stories,” says V. “That’s absolutely how it happens. It happened to me.”

When V was in the eighth grade, his award-winning marching band was invited to travel from Asheville, North Carolina, to London to march in the 1997 New Year’s Day Parade. “I was ridiculously excited,” says V. “We were going to be there for ten days and see all sorts of museums. It was going to be great.” His father was also excited — he had an overseas mission for V. “He sat me down and told me that when I got to London, I had two jobs. The first of those jobs was to make contact with the Provisional Irish Republican Army.” The liaison could help import rocket launchers to the United States for the upcoming Second American Revolution. “Then my job was [to] kill either Baron Rothschild, Her Majesty the Queen, or Prince Charles.”