“Go around it,” he says. “We need to get to the highway.”
They’re in a convoy of three SUVs, piloted by men with tactical combat experience. Together, they race down winding mountain roads, the fire so close sometimes they can feel the heat.
In the center car, Astrid sits with Mobley. His mood is toxic, body emanating clouds of medieval wrath. Even he can’t spin this recent turn of events as positive. He has been chased from two homes in two weeks, once by infidels and now by weather. This is not the story of a god.
They are headed for Palm Springs, where it’s 104 in the shade, and then maybe out of the country, if this persecution continues. E. L. Mobley holds no allegiance to anything as petty as a nation. He is a citizen of the world, or rather a member of its ruling class. He has billions in banks all over the globe, real estate owned by trusts he controls, and a fleet of planes to take him wherever he wants to go. Customs and Immigration are barely a formality. There are concierge services he uses, fixers he employs on every continent. People don’t say no to him. Governments cater to him. The biggest law firms in the world bill him thousands of hours a year for civil, criminal, and tax work. They have protected him from police investigations in Germany, Bermuda, and France and negotiated a slap on the wrist from the American Justice Department for that incident with the Calloway girl.
What force on Earth could stop a man like this?
Astrid has learned to anticipate his fickle needs, which is how she knows before Mobley snaps his fingers that he wants to make a call and what number he wants her to dial. Gabe Lin answers on the first ring.
“How soon can you have a team in Palm Spring?” Mobley asks.
“I can have men on the ground in ninety minutes,” Gabe says.
“We’re being chased out of the mountains by these ridiculous fires,” says Mobley. “Insult to injury after the events in Marfa, which—thank you again for the warning. I assume you dealt with the men you caught.”
“Yes, sir. My client had instructions for all of them.”
“Good. Can you send a team of six?”
“I’d recommend two teams of eight, Mr. Mobley. We’re hearing chatter that the domestic situation could turn violent in the next few days. Politics and all that. I’d want to make sure you don’t get any on you, if you know what I mean.”
“Two teams of eight it is. Contact Ms. Prefontaine to set up the details.”
He hangs up, hands the phone back. Astrid puts it in her jacket pocket. Sometimes when she wakes in the morning, there are bite marks on her stomach. She has the feeling of cold eyes watching her in the bathroom. She tells herself they’re spider bites, that the feeling of being watched is just that, a feeling. But Astrid has always felt that Mobley is something more than human. For her the feeling is secular—this is a man with the genetic superiority of a billionaire. Money and power coat him in a blanket of invulnerability. They cloak him with power in its purest form, the power to make anyone do anything, to influence governments, to bring corporations to their knees. She has heard others refer to him as a wizard in reverential tones. This is just their supernatural brains, she thinks, trying to deify something beyond their comprehension. What does the word even mean anymore? Who are the wizards of modern life? Technology nerds. Boys with pocket protectors you call when you can’t print.
Mobley is an emperor, a centibillionaire, worth one hundred billion dollars—$100,000,000,000. A man with more personal wealth than the annual GDP of Cuba or Ethiopia or Guatemala, Oman or Kenya or Luxembourg. A man worth twice the GDP of Slovenia and Lithuania, three times the GDP of Yemen and Latvia and Cameroon. Each of his billions = 100 x $100,000,000—itself a sum so large as to be achieved by only five thousand Americans. Each hundred million is in turn made up of individual millions, more money than most human beings on Planet Earth earn in a lifetime. Astrid looks over. Mobley is on her phone, reviewing photos of young women on an app he’s had designed—photos fed into the system by recruiters all over the country.
He has more money than 7,800,000,000 people. What does that make her boss, if not a god?
*
They reach the Palm Springs estate at 2:00 a.m., their SUVs covered in thick black soot. It is a thirty-acre compound on the edge of a suburban neighborhood, walled on all sides, with a main gate and one for deliveries behind the guest house. There is a tennis court, a stable, and a palatial pool, as well as a putting green and a helipad. The main house is over ten thousand square feet. There are two guard houses, one on the north side, the other on the south.