Carter Woodbine presses his back against the refrigerator, sucking the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, which blistered when he retrieved his hot smartphone from a pocket and threw it across the room. In the throes of his reaction, he has shrugged his left arm out of the sleeve, so the open robe hangs from his right shoulder. Standing barefoot in his disheveled jammies, he looks no more impressive than a large child who’s been caught on a forbidden post-midnight raid of the cookie jar.
The smoking phones have fallen silent.
After dropping Santana’s pistol in the duffel bag, holding Harris’s .45 in his right hand, Michael says, “Don’t test me.”
Removing his wet thumb and forefinger from his mouth, Woodbine says, “I’m not stupid.”
“Lacking evidence, I’ll take your word for it.”
On the floor, cradling his injured wrist in his good hand, blood bubbling in the deformed cartilage of his nostrils, Santana breathes through his mouth, spitting out curses between inhalations.
Michael scoops bundles of cash into the duffel bag with his left hand.
“How did you do that?” Woodbine asks.
“Do what?”
“You know what—with the phones.”
“Trade secret.”
“You think you’re cute.”
“My mother thought so, but I never could see it.”
“I’ll find you.”
“Knock yourself out.”
“You’re dead.”
“Been there, done that, didn’t care for it.” He has taken maybe 10 percent of the cash on the kitchen island. The bag is heavy. “I should set the rest on fire, knowing how you got it and what worse you’ll do with it.”
At the prospect of losing it all, Woodbine decides respectful silence is the best response.
As he zippers the bag shut, Michael says, “What is it with people like you?”
Repressed rage forces Woodbine to speak through clenched teeth. “What people would that be?”
“Those who had every advantage but went bad.”
“There isn’t bad or good.”
“Then what is there?”
“Opportunities. You take them or you don’t.”
“What name do they give that philosophy at Harvard?”
“Nihilism. It works. Looks like you live by it, too.”
“I only take from nihilists. Doesn’t make me one.”
“So you feel virtuous.”
“No. It just makes me a different kind of thief.”
Michael backs out of the kitchen with the .45 in his right hand and the duffel bag depending from his left.
In consideration of the Heckler & Koch, Carter Woodbine is slow to follow. He’ll probably try to use a landline to make a call. It won’t work.
Michael steps out of the apartment foyer into Woodbine’s public office and closes the door that is hidden by the cubist painting. It bears the signature of Picasso. He studies the work for a minute, twice as long as is fruitful.
He crosses the room and is about to step into the reception lounge when he hears Woodbine struggling with the Picasso door. The electronic lock is frozen and will remain that way until Michael decides to allow it to function, perhaps in an hour or two.
He follows the hidden stairs to the ground-floor lobby, takes the hallway to the rear of the building, and passes through a door into the upper level of the two-floor garage reserved for employees and clients, where he switches on the lights. The attorney’s white Bentley sedan is parked in the most convenient of the spaces. A glass-walled office is provided for a valet who is on duty during business hours for the sole purpose of bringing the vehicles of the law firm’s four partners to and from the front entrance, so that they do not need to bother themselves with negotiating the alleyway. This cubicle is protected by an electronic lock that is integrated with the building’s security system. Michael releases it without triggering an alarm, enters, locates the Bentley’s key where it hangs from a pegboard, and closes the door behind him.
Often he likes to walk. People who move through their days at high speed, always boxed in a vehicle, do not see the intricate details of either the natural world or the world that humanity has built for itself. The less they see, the less they understand, and the more likely they are to live in a bubble of unreality.
On this occasion, however, he has many miles to cover and a promise he hopes to keep before dawn.
TEN DAYS EARLIER: BEAUTIFICATION RESEARCH
The food in the cafeteria is less tasty than army K rations, but at least the ambience is better than the crumbling and cratered streets of some butt-of-the-world city where the meal would likely be interrupted by a firefight. Considering that this facility is a public-sector–private-sector partnership between the Internal Security Agency and two technology firms, each valued at more than a trillion dollars, it’s unfortunate that the food service is provided by the government rather than by the human resources division of one of the tech companies, which would have a better understanding of nutrition and flavor. Employees have no choice other than to eat lunch here, because before leaving the premises, they must undergo a seventy-five-minute decontamination that no one wants to endure twice in one day. Lunch boxes from home are forbidden for reasons known only to the bureaucrats who devised the protocols and who labor in a warren three thousand miles away, where no one can make contact with them.
Michael sits at a corner table with his best friend, Shelby Shrewsberry, who may be the only immunologist in the United States who is also a specialist in cerebrovascular function and the blood-brain barrier, six feet five, two hundred thirty pounds, and African American. Shelby, a genius, earned his first medical degree when he was twenty-two, but Michael possesses just slightly higher than average intelligence. Shelby plays the piano, violin, and saxophone. Michael has mastered the harmonica. Shelby has the face of a movie star—Michael not so much. They have been best friends for thirty-eight years, since they were six and their families were neighbors in a lower-middle-class community where, for different reasons, Michael and Shelby were viewed as nerds by most other kids.
Shelby, the senior biological scientist on this endeavor, has authority equal to that of Dr. Simon Bistoury, who serves as the reigning technology expert. Bistoury is a true believer in what they are doing here at the deceptively and absurdly named Beautification Research Project. Shelby, however, is profoundly skeptical about the wisdom and morality of this work, a point of view he has concealed in order to be in a position to go public and blow up the entire scheme if that becomes necessary. If he does so, he will be risking financial ruin and imprisonment, as will Michael, who was brought into this undertaking by Shelby to serve as chief of its security team. In this age when the fruits of corruption and the pursuit of power at all costs seem to motivate too many in the highest echelons of society, Shelby and Michael are no less outsiders than they were as kids; most of those in the current ruling elite would dismiss them as nerds if only they knew what principles guide them.
They never discuss their status as potential whistleblowers; at the moment, here in the cafeteria, they are discussing Shelby’s romantic longing for a woman, Nina, whom he’s met just three times and has not yet asked for a date. He encountered this jewel in her capacity as the accountant handling payroll and taxes for his cousin Carl, who owns three laundromats. Shelby was charmed not merely by her looks, but also by her intelligence, wit, and industriousness.