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And then Devine was gone, having receded silently to one of the chaise longues outside the Faraday cage next to a side table that served as a charging station.
“When you’re ready.” Devine’s words reverberated in the private scarlet room.
The sleek ergonomic mouse fit smoothly in Evan’s palm. He nudged the screens to life as he did in his own Vault in his own fortress.
A tiling of surveillance vantages filled his view, showing every conceivable nook and cranny of Tartarus. A time stamp rendered the current date and time. Empty corridors. Staff cleaning up detritus from the party. Tenpenny and his men were clustered in what looked like a billiard room. Countless guest bedrooms. Bathrooms the size of studios. Pool. Gardens. Crawl space. Attic. A ten-car garage. One square was even devoted to the scarlet room itself, Evan sitting watching himself watch himself. Or, more precisely, watching the spot where his head—fuzzed into a cubist confusion of overlapping invisibilities by his engineered shirt—watched another cubist confusion of overlapping invisibilities. And so on.
“Witness.” Devine now held an elaborate controller device, part joystick, part keyboard. Its thick cable threaded through the bars of the cage.
The tiled mosaic rotated, and now the time stamp showed an hour prior. Guests drinking, eating, snorting. Fucking on beds. Drunkenly fussing with bidets in the bathroom. An obese man was getting a hand job behind the garden shed.
Facial-, biometric-, and gait-recognition software identified the people despite their costumes, keying to separate text boxes linked to Wikipedia pages, social-media platforms, criminal records, dating website profiles, bank accounts, iPhone videos pulled straight off their devices. Evan caught sight of the governor he’d passed on the stairs snorting coke off the bare back of one of her underlings in the pantry.
Devine clicked and zoomed, the images deep-diving into profiles, collating public records. The flickering images played across Evan’s face, his body, dozens of scandals occurring in real time. The sheer amount of intel was dizzying, the eye of God, making the room itself seem to spin.
Evan stayed seated and held his balance.
“This?” Devine spread his arms as if to encompass Tartarus. “Is Pleasure Island. My guests are presented with options. They run to those that call to them. All I do is capture who they already are.”
Evan pivoted in the chair. “And use that against them.”
“Isn’t that the purest thing to use against people? Themselves?”
Evan had no ready answer.
“So you’re going to assassinate me for stealing personal data? Mostly compiled from posts and images that people fall all over themselves to publicize to the world?” The pace of his words had quickened, the first trace of the mental velocity Echo had described. “Ifthatticks the box of your knight-errant code, you’d better killeveryone.” A gleam of teeth. “The masterminds behind the social-media platforms, e-commerce, NSA, FBI, your friendly neighborhood PD.”
The Fifth Commandment:If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.
Evan did nothing.
Devine had no problem filling the negative space. “Or perhaps it’s the sex that concerns you? The recreational drugs? I don’t let anyone through my doors who isn’t at least twenty-one because, let’s face it, the age of consent isn’t the age of maturity. They choose to come here as adults, or at least their best version of it. I have medics on standby. Not a single overdose. I don’t do drugs myself. I don’t even take any”—the faintest hitch—“medications.”
“It’s not the sex,” Evan said. “Or the drugs.”
“Then it must be the power I’ve amassed from others who are willing to be corrupted. Want to execute me for that? Why not kill the president as well for sending you here to kill me? The Secret Service, too, while you’re at it. Even that nice special agent in charge, the one who caught you. There are so many power players out there with their hands on the levers.”
“Not all of them can swing a Senate vote.”
“Ah.” Devine’s eyes gleamed with a dark kind of delight. “The environmental bill.”
“How much do you stand to gain if it goes down?”
“Not a dime.”
Devine’s stare was unwavering, and Evan was surprised to find that he believed him. “Why, then?”
“Because,” Devine said. “The bill is nonsense. It’s not about the climate. It’s to assure Victoria’s reelection while funneling a trillion dollars to government contractors with noncompete clauses.”
The first-name drop did not go unnoticed.
“Same military-industrial hogs with their snouts in a different trough,” Devine said. “Have you read the bill?”
“Of course not.”
“The corn lobby’s pushing through a hundred billion dollars in subsidies to pursue corn ethanol even though sugarcane is cheaper and seven times more efficient. The primary contractor for wind pivoted from aeronautics last quarter in anticipation of the bill. Zero institutional expertise. The hexagonal head bolts for the turbines cost thirty-two dollars to manufacture—they’re planning on charging fourteen hundred and forty-three dollars per bolt. Each wind park has a profit margin of four thousand four hundred thirty-six percent. And that’s thefairestbit of price gouging. There’s massive resource misallocation, zero transparency, pork-barrel earmarks, collusion among subsidiaries. It’s not a free market fed by innovation and competition. It’s a captive market. And I am attempting to free it.”
“Why do you get to decide?” Evan asked.
