“Now,” he said, walking back toward the front the room, “as I’m entering my 60s, I’ve begun to consider how what I’ve done will be perceived historically — what my legacy will be.
“Are you old enough to remember the 1984 Olympics?” Prescott asked, abruptly changing the subject as he slid down into the armchair opposite Alec, casually crossing his right leg over his left.
Alec shook his head “no,” careful not to interrupt the mood with extraneous words, studying Prescott’s every move and expression.
“The United States won more gold medals that year than the next five countries on the medal list combined.” Prescott followed the statement with a period of silence sufficient to ensure that what he’d said had fully sunk in. “This will probably sound simplistic — and it was; I was just a kid at the time — but I saw what America could be that summer. Our 250 million against the world’s five billion, and we came out ahead.
“That lit a fire in me that’s never really been extinguished — even after I learned of the Soviet boycott.
“My goal from that summer forward became to do whatever I could to keep or, in some cases, to make this country great. Exceptional.
“At eighteen, I’d been offered admission to Princeton, but I had actually planned to delay my admission to serve in the army — not the reserves or ROTC, mind you. I was going to enlist.” After stealing a quick peek at Alec to measure his response, he glanced back down at his single-malt Scotch and swirled it reflectively in his snifter, studying the legs of the amber liquid as they slowly stretched down the sides of the glass. He’d never disclosed this to anyone before — not even his wife. After briefly reconsidering, he opted to keep going.
“My dad talked me out of it — and of course he was right. My talents lay in other areas. I had far more to contribute as a civilian. And I needed more of an academic foundation to maximize my personal strengths.
“As a junior at Princeton three years later, I finished a minor in American Politics — with the genuine intention of one day running for office.
“Again, my dad steered me away. ‘Governments are run by schmoozers,’ he told me. ‘Businesses are run by leaders.’ Again, he was right.
“Then, later that year, I was hit with a lightning bolt of clarity,” Prescott said, his voice rising as he stood back to his feet. “What made this country great — this country with such a brief history and a relatively small percentage of the world’s population — in everything from athletics to electronics, medicine to space exploration, entertainment to finance — was a very small number of exceptional individuals. America had always celebrated these men and women — native born and immigrant — and had given them the environment, the opportunity and the incentive to maximize their potential.
“But unlike the olympic development program, where the best of the best were identified early, nurtured, trained and, in due time, celebrated, I saw our country implementing policies focused not on nurturing genius but solely on pulling up those people with no potential for greatness, while the would-be-great seemed complacently contented as bigger-than-average fish in their small ponds.” Prescott walked toward the west wall and gazed deeply into the fire. There was no way for him to continue without potentially coming off as callous. So be it.
“I freely admit ‘no child left behind’ has never been my policy. And I could not care less how our average student stacks up against any other country’s average student in math or science,” Prescott said unapologetically, forcefully stoking the bottom log in the fire, which crumbled into a heap of glowing embers. “Some children are destined to work at the grocery checkout. Some are destined to become automatons in the world’s most powerful military. Some may carve out a nice living as an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer. There’s certainly no shame in that. We need those people. But they aren’t the individuals who make this country exceptional.
“The exceptional are few and far between. They make an impact. They leave a legacy. They would become my focus.”
Annamaria Olivera’s eyes struggled to half-mast, as she slowly transitioned from a sound sleep to a semi-conscious twilight. A persistent buzzing from the front-left pocket of her painted-on jeans and a continuous throbbing in her head wouldn’t allow her to fall back asleep, and the lingering alcohol that had kept her liver working double-time all night prevented her from fully waking up.
A thin web of viscous saliva stretched between the corner of her half-open mouth and a puddle of drool on the magazine cover her head had spent the night resting on, as she slowly pushed herself up off the floor. A veritable newsstand of similar magazines carpeted the opulent hotel suite, her image splashed across every one — Glamour, Vogue, Cosmo, Vanity Fair, and a host of weekly tabloids. How they — or she — ended up there was a mystery that would probably never be solved.
Holding her pounding head in one hand, straining to focus her blurred vision on the cell phone in her other, she mumbled the incoming text message out loud, “We need to meet — Fellow Avillage Orphan.”
And with those seven words, she was wide awake — despite the persistent headache.
Annamaria’s childhood had officially ended the day that Aaron Bradford had set foot in her Rainbow City orphanage.
For most of the past five years she had traveled the globe with her adoptive mother, an aging model, who was far too envious of her to be any kind of role model, and her father, a photographer who viewed her as no less an inanimate piece of artwork than any of the other photographers she’d worked with had.
When she’d turned seventeen, Bradford and her board of directors had happily signed off on her request to move on without her parents, saving the shareholders a year’s worth of parental stipends in the process. And while she hadn’t sacrificed any nurturing or love by ridding herself of her toxic adoptive parents, she had given up the last shred of structure she’d had in her life.
Her flawless look and effortless talent allowed her to live by her own rules, and she knew it. As was the case with many Avillage recruits, she resented her work — and the people who were profiting from it — but the money was addictive, and she’d been so deeply indoctrinated with the idea that she had to be successful that she kept going. Plus she knew if she stopped, even for a moment, she might be forced to look at what she’d become, and she wasn’t ready to deal with that.
The text message was a complete shock. Aside from her adoptive parents and a small group of people within Avillage, no one should have known that she was bound to Avillage, and as far as she knew, she had never come across anyone else who’d been adopted into the exchange.
She called down to the valet to fetch her car as she changed into a pair of looser-fitting jeans and a baggy sweatshirt and then threaded her impossibly shiny black hair through the back of a Yankees hat that she pulled down low over her eyes.
Her shoot that weekend was cancelled, effective immediately. It wasn’t as if her agency could do anything about it. The only threat they could possibly make was that they’d get someone else. But who would they get? The day would inevitably come when she would be replaceable, but for now, there was only one Annamaria Olivera in the fashion world.
Judging from the 617 area code on the text message, she figured she’d be heading to Boston.
Tenuous allies at best, Ryan and Dillon had at least managed to resolve one of their longstanding issues. Covert communication was no longer a problem now that they were living in the same city. With high-end walkie-talkies, Dillon, a freshman at MIT, could transmit clearly two miles up Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard, where Ryan was a third-year senior majoring in economics.