Ian noticed that he was picking at his fingernails. He stopped immediately. Thirteen all over again. Well, not quite. The fat was gone, as were the overbite and the Coke-bottle eyeglasses. He had a bit more money in his wallet, too.
He blinked twice, closing the file.
The bag of his magic solution was only half depleted. Ian visualized the substance cleansing his cells, buffing his telomeres to a spit shine. He imagined himself in fifty years and he looked more or less the same as today, save a gray hair here and there. He didn’t want to be a freak, after all.
He opened his eyes and stared at his figure in the mirror. Here is what he saw:
Hair: black, thick, combed back from his forehead. Eyes: one brown, one hazel. Ethnicity: Cosmopolitan. His father was British, an Oxonian by way of Newcastle, tall, square-jawed, blue-eyed, hair black as a raven, skin pale as a day-old corpse. His mother was a platinum-haired beauty from Kiev, her Mongol blood evident in her sloe eyes and razor-sharp cheekbones. Ian wasn’t sure what that made him. His skin was the color of honey, his nose as aquiline as a Roman emperor’s. Other parts had long since been replaced or improved, and as such were no help either.
Ian had given up a flag to claim as his own long ago. Born in London, he’d spent his childhood skipping across Europe as his father advanced rung by rung up the endless hierarchy that was the British Foreign Office. It was a tour of second-rate diplomatic backwaters, with Sofia, Tallinn, and Leipzig the shining lights among them. Still, until he was fifteen, he had considered himself the Queen’s proudest subject, as loyal as John Bull himself.
And then, in an instant, everything changed.
It was a rain-soaked Monday morning in Bruges, no different from any of the dismal January days preceding it. A family breakfast of eggs, beans, and sausage, or as close to a “fry-up” as his Russian mother could manage. Looking back thirty-odd years later, Ian saw the scene as if he were living it. There was the usual banter about football matches the day before. And then it was time for goodbyes. Peter Prince left first, as work demanded. Father and son rose from the table. It was their daily ritual. A handshake and a kiss on the cheek. His father was dressed no differently than on any other day. Navy pinstripe suit. Maroon silk tie. Hair parted with a razor-straight slash. Satchel in his left hand.
“ ’Bye, son.”
A last look over his shoulder. A door closed. And he was gone.
Never to be seen or heard from by any living being again.
Not dead. Not imprisoned. Not kidnapped. Not any one of a thousand explainable disappearances.
Peter St. John Prince simply vanished into thin air.
And so began the second half of Ian’s life.
The unknowing.
All this Ian saw when he looked into his own eyes.
He’d never stopped searching for his father. And now-if the cooling system worked-he had the tool to help find him. Titan.
Ian snapped back to the present. He focused on the second topic. Bluffdale. He blinked and the file opened. He drew up the latest photographs of the massive facility. It was alternately called the Utah Data Center, and it belonged to the National Security Agency, the United States’ most secretive intelligence organization.
Sitting on 240 acres of land above the Jordan River in the northernmost part of the state, the Utah Data Center had one goal and one goal only: to collect the combined traffic of everything that passed through the Internet: e-mails, cell-phone calls, web searches. Everything.
The NSA had chosen the world’s most powerful supercomputer for the task.
In two days Ian was set to fly to the East Coast for a meeting with Titan’s most important client. The meeting was at Fort Meade, Maryland. The client was the National Security Agency. The United States government would not be pleased to learn that it had purchased a supercomputer that had a tendency to melt when operating at full capacity.
Ian closed the file.
The bag of his magic potion was empty.
He pulled the needle from his arm and stood, making sure to place a wad of gauze over the puncture.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
So who was he, then?
In the end, Ian preferred to think of himself in terms of numbers. Height: Five feet ten inches. Weight: 175 pounds. Body fat: 16%. IQ: 156.
There was a last number he liked best: 58.
As of this unpleasantly hot day in July, Ian Prince was worth $58 billion.
8
It was a quiet night in Pedro’s Especiale Bar and Grill in Austin, Texas.
Tank Potter sat atop his favorite stool, elbows on the bar, eyes glued to the envelope placed in front of him. Pedro kept the joint as dark as a Brownsville cathouse, and Tank had to squint to read the words typed across its face: Henry Thaddeus Potter. Personal and Confidential.
Only a few of the regulars were in. Dotty and Sam, the swinging septuagenarians, were swilling margaritas at one end. French and Bobby had taken claim of the TV and were cursing at ESPN at the other. Tank’s stool was in the middle. He called it his “umpire’s post,” because from it he was able to adjudicate any disagreements that might break out. He was hard to miss no matter where he sat. At forty-two years of age, he went six-four, two-fifty, with forty-six-inch shoulders. There was also the matter of his hair, which was thick, brown, and unruly and defied the best efforts of his brush. To combat any impression of carelessness, he made a point to dress neatly. This evening his khakis were pressed, his Oxford button-down starched so that it could stand on its own. As always, he wore Nocona ropers to remind him that he was a Texas boy, born and bred.
“Pedrito,” he called, raising a hand to give the place a little excitement. “Uno más, por favor.”
A chubby middle-aged man with slicked-back hair and a Pancho Villa mustache poured him a shot of Hornitos in a clean glass. “Good news or bad?”
“What do you mean?”
“You been staring at that envelope for the last hour. You going to open it or what?”
“Already did.” Tank tapped the envelope on the bar, feeling the single sheet of paper slide from side to side. He was a journalist by profession, and he was hard put to come up with ninety-six words that more concisely conveyed the message on that page.
“And?”
“Buggy whip,” said Tank.
Pedro opened a Tecate and placed the bottle next to the tequila. “What is a leather crop used to hit a horse to make it pull a carriage or one of them hansom cabs in Central Park? Buggy whip.”
“Wrong,” said Tank, with a polite tilt of the bottle before he took a swig. “And you don’t have to repeat the word at the end. This isn’t a spelling bee.”
“What do you mean, wrong? What do you think a buggy whip is?”
“Technically, you’re correct,” Tank conceded. “But it wasn’t a question.”
“You trying to make some kind of point?”
“You asked about the envelope.”
Pedro leaned against the bar. “Okay, then. Shoot.”
And so Tank told Pedro the story.
At the turn of the twentieth century, everyone rode horses to get around. Wagons and carriages were the most popular means of transport for groups of people traveling any kind of distance. You couldn’t have a carriage without a buggy whip. Buggy whips were everywhere, and so were the companies that made them.
Then one day automobiles appeared. They were regarded as marvels and quickly became objects of envy. But for many years they were too expensive for regular folk. Still, little by little the price of this newfangled invention fell. Each year more people bought automobiles and fewer people rode in horse-drawn carriages.