Page 128 of Antihero

Devine dug his hand into the ice, came up with a sloppy three or four towelettes, and Evan did the same. Cubes clung dryly to the terry cloth. Everything misted.

Their bare feet slapped the tile as they padded across the spa. The sauna was proper Finnish—toaster-intense, delicious reek of cedar, dry as British gin. Inside, Devine twirled the wheel-mounted hourglass to set the sand trickling.

Evan gauged him to see if he was playing any games in here.

They sat opposite once more on the second tier, neither choosing the lower perch. Devine wiped the wooden backing with an iced towel so it wouldn’t burn his back. Evan watched his eyes. Devine did not overtly check Evan’s reaction to his concession to the heat.

Evan’s back was strong. It had endured parachute landings, meat-shuddering impacts, and the heels of the foremost ashiatsu practitioner in Asakusa. It could contend with a sauna. Reclining, he pressed the flesh of his shoulder blades to the toasted cedar planks, sirloin sizzling on a grill. He looked at Luke Devine. He paid attention.

Devine blinked once.

Then gave the faintest shake of the head, a microdisplay of admiration, and he said, “The burn wrecks me.”

He was not, then. He was not playing games. Could a seed of trust be planted between them?

Evan studied him in his old-man swim trunks, the lifted whorl of his hair, the thinning more pronounced here in the naked lights of the sauna.

And lowered his guard by one eighth of a standard deviation.

“Well?” Evan said. “RedLite?”

“Public markets can behave irrationally,” Devine said. “I don’t. At least not when engaging with them. So. Here’s what I would do.” His features were strong, his personality baked through them, muscled into place by the repetition of a million expressions. “They’re reeling right now, in a capital squeeze. My canaries tell me they’re trying to raise another two hundred fifty million, a hundred through selling stock and one fifty through new debt facility. The latter I can crush with three well-placed phone calls. As for the former? Since the cyberattack, the stock is down forty-nine percent. Juicy. But there’s more to go.”

He pressed his palms together and stared at the seams of his pinkies. “I’d short the stock hard—through proxies, of course, to dodge an SEC prostate exam. I have unlimited money to cover a short squeeze, so we’re defended there. Next move would be to make the stock tumble harder. Before the system got cheese-grated, your associate, Ms. Josephine, made sure to grab all RedLite usernames, and the password hashes, which she cracked with stunning efficiency. That means we already have the identity of every last lotion connoisseur. The Brain can cross-index which users have died—I’m guessing at least two percent. I’d leak those names immediately and widely to key movers in the mainstream media and flood every social-media channel with their user information. That a) minimizes collateral damage for the living, b) terrorizes the other ninety-eight percent, and c) sends investors, users, and stockholders blitzing for the exits. Recovery looks unlikely, the future is lost, et cetera. Which means the stock tanks further, if we’re lucky by north of ninety percent.”

His breathing had quickened, his words picking up the manic patter Evan was accustomed to. Devine seemed to notice it, too, allowing the briefest of pauses, but words seized him again as they did. “I’d cash out my shorts, rebuy the stock at two cents on the dollar off the plummet, stake a majority position, fire the board members, insert my lackies, pull the plug, and let the company evaporate.”

In the heat, Luke’s face had grown shiny red. He sat perched on planks of cedar like a roasting fish. “I’d gut the remaining assets and affiliate companies of all prurient content, part the pieces off for Chinese scrap metal. The now-unemployed board members and C-suiters will already have had their stock positions crushed, but for a chaser I’d take out billboards in their hometowns featuring their close-up photos and highlighting their role in illicit pornographic exploitation. Then spin up a C4, name it something cutely banal and alliterative, Concerned Citizens for Civility, make an ad buy on local TV stations and flood the home zip codes of top RedLite executive officers with content featuring faces and favorite fetish videos.”

Devine swiped at the sweat on his brow but did not pause. “Then I’d earmark another tranche—twenty, thirty million—to fund consumer-advocacy groups to keep whoever’s still standing tied up in litigation for the next half decade. We steer the narrative publicly, legally, and legislatively so the courts are forced to arrive at a make-an-example gargantuan settlement, after which we funnel the money back to the sexual-exploitation victims so they can rebuild their lives. I can set all this in motion with two cups of espresso, a phone, and a focused half hour.”

At last he stopped.

The sand kept trickling through the hourglass.

A lot of it fell.

“God,” Devine said, annoyed, “are you always this … taciturn?”

More sand moved through the glass pinch point.

“That,” Evan said. “Do all that.”

They sat together until the last of the sand trickled through and then sat for a spell after that.

49The Whole Putrid Mess

As a Secret Service agent, Naomi Templeton had operational planning abilities that were nearly Orphan level. She’d arranged for Anca’s statement to be taken in a decommissioned admin building near the junction of Floyd Bennett Field and Barren Island, where southeast Brooklyn began to fray into spits, inlets, and tidal channels as it encountered the Atlantic. The mass of marsh and wetland, nosed into Jamaica Bay like a horse’s head, housed scattered federal and state facilities and airfields, more defunct than active. These included the training grounds for NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit, the Service’s closest collaborator for United Nations General Assembly meetings.

This federal-state cooperation made for an easy flow of off-the-books favors. In order for Orphan X to dodge checkpoints and stray excursionists, Templeton had cleared an unofficial route along the desolate western shoreline, onetime dumping grounds for manufacturers of glue, fish oil, and fertilizer.

The meeting would be conducted in private, the location shrouded in secrecy to ensure that Evan could accompany Anca. Though the route from Anca’s would take over an hour, Evan picked her up forty-five minutes early, leaving Candy to stand guard in the apartment.

Coasting along in the 450 EQS+, Evan glanced over at Anca in the passenger seat. She was sitting still, eyes dead ahead, purse at her feet, a tome clutched in her lap.

He had initiated the heated steering wheel and the wave massage, the rollers coaxing lumbar relaxation through leather upholstery. The LED strips providing interior ambient light were dialed to a cobalt blue, and his RoamZone charged wirelessly on a pad at the front of the console. The cabin felt like a cocoon—serene, cushioned, hermetically sealed. The vehicle was a preposterous item of luxury; it felt like driving a cloud. He enjoyed it more than he wished to admit.

In contrast, the route south through Queens was less than picturesque. Flushing and Jamaica scrolled by in a haze of graffitied stone, brick projects, and rusted overpasses. There were fast-food joints and liquor stores and strip malls with Mandarin signage crowded three stories high.