“I don’t know. Publically, Epstein is a pretty vocal critic. But John has a lot of friends here. Using his name was the only way I knew to get a meeting.”
“So what’s their relationship?”
“I don’t really know. John respects Epstein, but I think he feels they’re playing different roles. Some people compare them to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.”
“Lousy parallel. Dr. King fought for equality and integration, not building a separate empire, and Malcolm X may have advocated black rights by any means necessary, but he didn’t run a terror network that blew up buildings.”
“I don’t want to argue about it.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “But I’m not going to pretend to be with Smith.”
“You shouldn’t. I wouldn’t lie to him at all, if I were you.”
“Not much point,” he said. “I can’t ask him for help if I don’t tell him why I need it.” Tough tightrope to walk. You have to convince a man who has everything to lose by admitting a connection to John Smith to do just that. All without telling him too much. He forced a cocksure grin. “Thanks for this. For keeping your end.”
“Yeah. Well, we had a deal.” She opened the car door. “Come on. Let’s go meet a billionaire.”
The grounds were deserted, and given the sun blasting down from the big blue sky, he wasn’t surprised. The complex had more than twenty buildings—twenty-two, if he remembered correctly—but the one they entered was at the center. It didn’t look like much, none of the grand corporate styling he would have expected in Chicago or DC. Though taller than the rest, it was the same featureless solar glass. Of course. Solar glass bounces the sun’s heat, transforms it to energy. Marble is heavy and needs to be shipped in. And ornate carvings are nostalgia.
Old-world thinking.
The lawyer was one of the older people Cooper had seen in the last days. Early fifties, with close-cropped silver hair and hand-tailored suit, he radiated a two-grand-an-hour vibe. “Mr. and Mrs. Cappello. I’m Robert Kobb. If you’ll come with me?” He spun without waiting for an answer.
The lobby was a bright atrium with one wall dedicated to a thirty-foot tri-d screen running CNN in stunningly crisp resolution—Epstein held a 30 percent stake in Time Warner—and they’d barely set foot in it when the man met them. Cooper had expected to be kept waiting for hours if they got in at all. Apparently John Smith’s name carried a lot of weight here. Was the billionaire in league with the terrorist? If so, the situation was worse than anyone had dared believe.
“How was your trip in?”
“Bumpy,” Cooper said.
The lawyer smiled. “Gliders take some getting used to. This is your first visit to New Canaan Holdfast, correct?”
His smile is bullshit. He knows who we are, but he’s keeping to the cover story. A knowledge hoarder. “Yes.”
“What do you think?”
“Very impressive.”
Kobb nodded, led them past a row of elevators to the last in line, and touched his palm to a featureless plate. The doors slid silently open. “It’s growing fast. You should have seen Tesla five years ago. Just dirt and sky.”
The elevator moved so smoothly that Cooper couldn’t say for sure if they were going up or down. He put his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels. A moment later the doors parted, and Kobb led them out.
One side of the hall was glass floor to ceiling, the sun dialed down from blast furnace to a warm glow. The other side was an ornate garden built into a tiered wall, greenery spilling over the edges of sleek inset planters. The air felt flush with oxygen. “Nice.”
“We use what we have here. And we have plenty of sun.”
“Isn’t it some sort of sin to waste water here?”
“They’re gene-modified, spliced with some form of cactus. The water needs are miniscule. I don’t really understand it,” Kobb said in a way that suggested he understood perfectly well, but suspected you might not. The lawyer led them past several conference rooms, then touched another featureless spot on the wall to unlock a door at the end. “Mr. Epstein’s office.”
Considering the wealth in play, the room was understated. Seamless glass on two sides that gave way to a tumbling view of the city and the desert beyond, a smooth wooden desk, a conference area with comfortable seating. A pale young girl, Cooper guessed she was ten or so, sat on the couch playing a game on a d-pad. Her hair was dyed a sickly Kool-Aid green. A niece? Epstein didn’t have any children.
The lawyer ignored her completely. “Please, have a seat. Erik will join us in a moment. Can I get you anything? Coffee?”
“I’m fine, thanks. Allison?”
Shannon shook her head. Instead of sitting, she glided to one of the windows, stared out at the view.
“Hi,” Cooper said to the little girl. “My name’s Tom.”
She looked up from the datapad. Her eyes were a green almost as startling as her hair, and far too old for her body. “No it isn’t,” she said, then went back to her game.
He felt a snap of embarrassment laced with anger, swallowed it. The girl was obviously a reader; even beyond her casual call-out on his lie, she had all the signs: antisocial tendencies, a hunger for nonhuman stimulus, the need to physically express her difference. And it wasn’t really a surprise to think that Epstein would use the abilities of the gifted around him. He just hadn’t expected a child.
She must be exceptionally powerful. The thought came with a wave of discomfort. To a tier-one reader, the whole world was naked emperors. Her knowledge would go beyond knowing that he was lying about his identity; within a few minutes of listening to him, watching him, she would know things that his ex-wife didn’t.
It was one of the few gifts that he really considered curses. Every moment, every human interaction, readers swam in the river of lies that made up everyday life. Worse, they picked up on the darker elements of personalities, the universal Jungian shadow of the human mind, the part that relished torture and pain and humiliation. Everyone had that shadow. For most people, it was controlled, expressed in subverted ways: pornography, aggressive sports, violent daydreams. It was part of the human animal, and most of the time, a harmless part. Thoughts were only thoughts, after all, and these were held close.
But readers saw them all around, in every person. Every kindness was underscored by it. Daddy might protect you, but a tiny part of him wanted to hold the babysitter down and do things to her. Mommy might wipe your tears, but something in her wanted to claw your arms and shriek in your face to shut the hell up. Unsurprisingly, readers ran to madness. The healthiest usually ended up shut-ins, locked in a tiny controlled world where they could count on the things around them.
Most committed suicide.
Robert Kobb coughed into a closed fist and said, “You’ll have to forgive Millicent. She says what’s on her mind.”
“Nothing to forgive,” Cooper said. “She’s right.”
“Yes, I know.” Robert Kobb gave a bland smile and settled himself on the couch beside Millicent. She shied away from him without glancing from her game. Kobb said, “You’re actually Nick Cooper.”
“Yeah.”
“Erik asked me to clear the time as soon as he heard from you this morning. He didn’t tell me what this was in reference to.”
Cooper flopped in one of the chairs, measured the lawyer. Something about the man bugged him. The pose of authority, calling his boss by his first name. That and his veneer of aw-shucks normalcy. “He didn’t know. Ask you a question?”