It occurred to me to run-I’d made no promises-but the guards were still all around us and, as soon as we stepped outside, there was Marat, Old Leatherface with his flickering fingertips. I saw Max look him up and down while we piled back into the big black SUV; it quickly rolled down the driveway past the few remaining cars and out toward the same bridge we came in over.
“I can’t tell you the impression you made on me, those years ago,” Avery told Max, watching his reaction like the performer he was. “I remember you lamenting there was nothing positive you could do with your gifts,” he continued, pointing out the tinted windows at the last stragglers leaving his lecture. “This is just a tiny part of what we do, Max, but I think we help. People come to me in distress and anxiety. Whether their anxiety is real or imagined, it can be crippling. And they leave feeling good about themselves. They can’t help it.”
“You might even say they have no choice,” Max replied, smiling as loosely as he knew how. I’d seen all his smiles by that point. “Where’d all this come from, Jim? You certainly weren’t so chipper as the Senator’s Chief of Staff.” Avery’s smile vanished suddenly; the words came out of his mouth clenched, struggling for air.
“I worked for Alan Hammond for eighteen years. My first job out of college was with his campaign. He promised I’d succeed him-several times, he promised. I made the same mistake with Alan that lots of people made over the years-I thought he could deliver. The instant he announced his retirement, he became the old geezer mumbling to himself in the back of the room. None of the people who made the actual decisions cared a damn what he thought or what promises he’d made.”
We filtered onto a highway heading west-it might have been the same highway we drove in on, though I couldn’t tell for sure-and then, after a few minutes, smaller local roads, grubby vistas of gas stations, motels, fast food joints and slow-moving traffic heading South in glum orderly columns.
“I’d been with him sixteen years when the bottom blew out. I’d shot my wad on a dead end. Do you know what that feels like?” he raged, voice rising but not really even seeking an answer, talking really to himself. “I flipped. I swore to myself that nothing like that would ever- ever — happen to me again. I was going to find something rock-solid to build the rest of my life on. Something I could control, some valuable resource that couldn’t get voted out of office, couldn’t forget its promises-something the smart money hadn’t bought up already.” He tried to recover, laughing out the window but going nervous about it a moment later, as though recognizing the admission in it.
“When you work for a lame duck, nobody’s logging your time anymore. Nobody cared if I showed up at the office. So I got in the car and drove, drove whichever direction looked good at the crossroads.” He counted the suburban streets stacked up across the hillsides. “That’s where I discovered the power of real fear-fear for yourself, fear for your own life.
“See, when you’re in government, you’re always worrying about out there. Social Security needs help and the terrorists are out to get us. But those things are happening out there, to somebody else. Now, with Alan useless and no idea where I fit in the world, for the first time, it was me. All my doors opened over a cliff.”
All at once, Avery’s ease returned-the big smile flashed across his face again. “So I drove. And once I’d driven around a while, I discovered that gnawing fear just made me a good American. Out in the world, eating in diners and staying in local motels and filling up where the price was good, I met people who hated their jobs but worked eighteen hours a day because they were afraid of losing them, people who were using credit cards to pay credit card bills or their groceries, people who knew their choice was to pay their kid’s college or get sick but not both. This wasn’t out there anymore-this was just normal life. Fear was what everybody lived with all the time.
“And the good news for me was, even though they were desperate for things to get better, people had no real hope it ever would. Because they knew what I’d just discovered-that big business and government don’t live in their world. People like me never come in contact with that fear, don’t know it exists-we’ve got a safety net. And since people in government and business are the ones who make the laws, how could it ever get better? The man pumping gas or selling iPods knows how the world works. We have the helicopters and bodyguards and photo ops; they have the bills and the insecurity and twenty different ways to go completely off the tracks.”
We were off the main roads now, into an area of Virginia dense with trees and constantly overflown by low-hanging airliners. Avery sat straight in his seat and sized up the view through the smoked windows. “And that’s when I figured it out: the really scarce natural resource is Hope. Most people are starving for it. Better yet, the winners-the imperial few-aren’t used to anything going wrong anymore and they have so much to lose. So nobody’s confident, not for long. Everybody falters, shudders-even if they don’t, everybody fears. So they all need Hope-and I can provide that. That was my answer and fortunately I was able to figure out what to do about it. I’m a cartel, Max,” he said, his smile going even brighter. “I’m the OPEC of Hope.”
The van headed into a walled-off industrial park, passing four or five boxlike glass structures on its way to a bunkerlike building with slit windows scarring its concrete face. I recognized the place from the picture I’d torn out of the paper: L Corp headquarters.
We pulled under an awning in front. Bodyguards ringed us immediately, opening the car doors and ushering us into the lobby. Attendants in familiar jumpsuits bustled behind a brushed aluminum counter with inset computer monitors and one of those free-standing security scanners like the airports. One of the bodyguards opened the gate for Avery. A very attractive blonde met him immediately and pinned a security badge on his lapel, then handed another to Volkov, who grinned and pinned it to his own jacket.
“Sam, we need two more badges for our guests,” Avery said and the blonde gave us the once-over. From her expression, we must not have looked too impressive, which wasn’t real surprising, considering we’d been in the same clothes since Florida.
“What grade?” she asked.
“Full grade,” Avery answered. “This is the House that Renn built-and that,” he gestured, “that is Renn.”
Sam the blonde gave Max another pass now, with that same awestruck look they all had who knew his name. She pulled two yellow badges from a cabinet at the back wall, pinning one to Max’s collar-they seemed to be having a staring contest the whole time-and handing me mine, just to let me know how I rated. We followed Avery through a pair of electric swooshing doors like in Star Trek and down an antiseptic hallway cluttered with projectors and monitors on roll-away carts and handtrucks piled with fold-up chairs. “It’s a mess,” Avery conceded. “We’re expanding rapidly. We’ll have a new headquarters next year but until then we’re overflowing.”
“This is part of Your World?” Max asked. He had that wide-eyed look he’d had in the dressing room-apparently this place was also wired for white noise. Which didn’t make me feel any more secure.
“Oh no,” Avery tutted. “ Your World is a non-profit charitable foundation, with headquarters three blocks from the White House. Your World supports personal growth and discovery around the world. L Corp’s business is more…pragmatic, shall we say. The two have no connection, as far as anyone can tell.”