Page 60 of Lone Wolf

Evan shook his head.

“What?” Devine said.

“Fucking billionaires. You people are the worst.”

Devine laughed a musical laugh. “It’s true. Most are still back on the playground, riding their proprietary machine-learning algorithms like bumper cars, trying to win the game.”

“What game?”

“King of the hill. And a few guys have the biggest cars right now. Musk. Zuck. Allman.”

“And you.”

Devine answered with a wink and held his train of thought: “COVID, war, locusts—the more bad shit happens, the more money goes to the top. Not because everyone’s evil but because that’s how the system’s increasingly set up. In the past four decades in this country, fifty trillion dollars has moved from the bottom ninety percent to the top one percent. And the ordinary folk, all those outrage consumers at home watching their cable news and clicking their Twitter feeds, rubbing their temples with dismay and talking about how it’s just so terrifying what the other side doesn’t understand about themselves? They don’t get it. That’s all a distraction to keep that pipeline open, to keep that fifty trillion dollars moving up the ladder. All their think pieces and protests and conspiracies and riots?” He paused for a breath or perhaps not. “Real power won’t be stopped by any of that. Real power is conducting all that.”

“What will stop it?”

“Great men,” Devine said. “Or great women.”

Evan stared at the beckoning bottles behind the bar. He felt exhausted. It was always the same—the same suffering and destruction, the same age-old battles, the same powerful men looking down at it all from on high through the filter of the latest recycled ideology.

“But the hour grows late,” Devine continued, always quick to fill a void. “It’s a widening gyre—the blood-dimmed tide has been loosed, and all that. When we monetize bad shit, we get more bad shit. It’s simply too good for the bottom line. And humans don’t even run what happens anymore. Algorithms run it. We just exist to service the computers to service the algorithms. Even most of our so-called visionaries.”

“Like Allman?”

“They joke that half of the big-tech founders are on the spectrum. But some people aren’t missing social cues. They just don’t give a damn.” Devine thought a moment, the tip of his tongue probing the side of his cheek. “Some people don’t give a damn about anything.”

“I need to get in to see him.”

“Why do you care that an AI guy got murdered? Is this one of your … missions?” Luke weighted the last word with a touch of disdain.

“He had a daughter. Seventeen years old.”

“You’re not getting sentimental, are you?”

“No. Just more selective in where I direct my energy.”

“And you don’t want to force your way to Allman because…?”

“I need to talk with him. Freely. I have no idea if he has anything to do with this.”

“And attaching electrical wires to his testicles makes for stilted conversation?”

“Unhygienic, too.”

“I can’t just ring him up and ask him to meet with an assassin.”

Evan took another drink of the gin and tonic, the smell of orange rising from the glass. “So how would you approach it?”

Devine looked flattered that Evan was asking his opinion. “You’d need a legitimate cover.”

“Like a journalist?”

“Allman would never talk to a journalist.”

“What then? Investor? Insurance agent investigating—”

“No. No.” Devine leaned back, lowered his head to think, his smooth face aimed at the empty scotch glass before him. “It’s all ego with people like Allman. It’s the only thing left that interests them.”