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“And yet, I live a good life,” I said. “Tell me. Why would you consider me insane, but the man who can’t hold a job, who cheats on his wife, who can’t keep his temper in check? You call him sane?”
“Well, perhaps not completely . . . ”
“Plenty of ‘sane’ people can’t manage to keep it all under control. Their mental state—stress, anxiety, frustration—gets in the way of their ability to be happy. Compared to them, I think I’m downright stable. Though I do admit, it would be nice to be left alone. I don’t want to be anyone special. ”
“And that’s where all of this came from, isn’t it?” Monica asked. “The hallucinations?”
“Oh, you’re a psychologist now? Did you read a book on it while we were flying? Where’s your new aspect, so I can shake hands with her?”
Monica didn’t rise to the bait. “You create these delusions so that you can foist things off on them. Your brilliance, which you find a burden. Your responsibility—they have to drag you along and make you help people. This lets you pretend, Mister Leeds. Pretend that you are normal. But that’s the real delusion. ”
I found myself wishing the flight would hurry up and be finished.
“I’ve never heard that theory before,” Tobias said softly from behind. “Perhaps she has something, Stephen. We should mention it to Ivy—”
“No!” I snapped, turning on him. “She’s dug in my mind enough already. ”
I turned back. Monica had that look in her eyes again, the look a “sane” person gets when they deal with me. It’s the look of a person forced to handle unstable dynamite while wearing oven mitts. That look . . . it hurts far more than the disease itself does.
“Tell me something,” I said to change the topic. “How’d you let Razon get away with this?”
“It isn’t like we didn’t take precautions,” Monica said dryly. “The camera was locked up tightly, but we couldn’t very well keep it completely out of the hands of the man we were paying to build it. ”
“There’s more here,” I said. “No offense intended, Monica, but you’re a sneaky corporate type. Ivy and J. C. figured out ages ago that you’re not an engineer. You’re either a slimy executive tasked with handling undesirable elements, or you’re a slimy security forces leader who does the same. ”
“What part of that am I not supposed to take offense at?” she asked coolly.
“How did Razon have access to all of the prototypes?” I continued. “Surely you copied the design without him knowing. Surely you fed versions of the camera to satellite studios, so they could break them apart and reverse engineer them. I find it quite a stretch to believe he somehow found and destroyed all of those. ”
She tapped her armrest for a few minutes. “None of them work,” she finally admitted.
“You copied the designs exactly?”
“Yes, but we got nothing from it. We asked Razon, and he said that there were still bugs. He always had an excuse, and Razon did have trouble with his own prototypes, after all. This is an area of science nobody has breached before. We’re the pioneers. Things are bound to have bugs. ”
“All true statements,” I said. “None of which you believe. ”
“He was doing something to those cameras,” she said. “Something to make them stop functioning when he wasn’t around. He could make any of the prototypes work, given enough time to fiddle. If we swapped in one of our copies during the night, he could make it function. Then we’d swap it back, and it wouldn’t work for us. ”
“Could other people use the cameras in his presence?”
She nodded. “They could even use them for a little while when he wasn’t there. Each camera would always stop working after a short time, and we’d have to bring him back in to fix it. You must understand, Mister Leeds. We only had a few months during which the cameras were working at all. For the majority of his career at Azari, he was considered a complete quack by most. ”
“Not by you, I assume. ”
She said nothing.
“Without him, without that camera, your career is nothing,” I said. “You funded him. You championed him. And then, when it finally started working . . . ”
“He betrayed me,” she whispered.
The look in her eyes was far from pleasant. It occurred to me that if we did find Mr. Razon, I might want to let J. C. at him first. J. C. would probably want to shoot the guy, but Monica wanted to rip him clean apart.
“Well,” Ivy said, “it’s a good thing we picked an out-of-the-way city. If we had to find Razon in a large urban center—home to three major world religions, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world—this would be really tough. ”
I smiled as we walked out of the airport. One of Monica’s two security goons went to track down the cars her company had ordered for us.
My smile didn’t do much more than crack the corner of my lips. I hadn’t gotten much study done on Arabic during the second half of the flight. I’d spent the time thinking about Sandra. That was never productive.
Ivy watched me from concerned eyes. She could be motherly sometimes. Kalyani strolled over to listen in on some people speaking in Hebrew nearby.
“Ah, Israel,” J. C. said, stepping up to us. “I’ve always wanted to come over here, just to see if I could slip through security. They have the best in the world, you know. ”
He carried a black duffle on his back that I didn’t recognize. “What’s that?”
“M4A1 carbine,” J. C. said. “With attached advanced combat optical gunsight and M203 grenade launcher. ”
“But—”
“I have contacts over here,” he said softly. “Once a SEAL, always a SEAL. ”
