Текст книги "Undivided"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

29 • Hayden

The waiting is unbearable, but Hayden cannot let it show, or it would arouse suspicion. He wanted to go with Bam and Jeevan—not that he doesn’t trust them, but he knows that Starkey is a difficult force to overcome. He was crafty enough to get this far, mesmerizing hundreds of kids long past the point when they should have done their own reality checks. Who’s to say if he might not Houdini his way out of the trap they’ve set for him?

Hayden still finds it amazing that Starkey managed to carve himself a cult, with few tools beyond communal anger and a fistful of personal magnetism. But on the other hand, there are plenty of historical precedents.

It’s morning in the abandoned plant that’s not so abandoned anymore now that it’s home to almost seven hundred storks. Breakfast is in full swing. The kids eat in three shifts in the plant’s basement, using folding chairs and tables that were here for them when they arrived—as were comfortable bed rolls—all courtesy of the “applause department.” Very organized, this society of randomized violence. They’ve vowed to keep the storks safe, although Hayden suspects they’re only safe until the applause department decides it’s time to sacrifice them, just as they sacrifice all the other angry kids they recruit to serve the cause of mayhem. The storks won’t blow themselves up, of course, but in the end, following Starkey off a cliff isn’t all that different.

Everyone knows their next mission. Starkey made an announcement, and rallied the troops. He hasn’t told them yet that their ultimate objective is the extermination of the Mousetail tithes. They may never know. The only reason Hayden knows is because Bam shared it with him. Hayden suspects Starkey has selected an elite team to do the dirty deed once the harvest camp has been taken down. Or maybe he plans on herding the tithes into a single building and doing it himself with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. They certainly have bunker busters that can do it in one fell swoop.

But that’s tomorrow. It doesn’t explain why Starkey isn’t here today. Hayden knows why. After all, it was his plan. The storks, however, can’t know the truth.

“He went with a special team to do some reconnaissance,” Hayden tells the masses when people begin to question Starkey’s absence. Most of the kids accept it, and are relieved because maybe it pushes their imminent attack on Mousetail back a day or two. Of course, there are some kids who are suspicious. Garson DeGrutte is full of questions.

“Why didn’t he tell us? Why didn’t the clappers do reconnaissance for us, isn’t that their job?” And, of course, the question that’s most on his mind, “Why didn’t he take me?”

Hayden plays it cool with a shrug. “Who can read the mind of the master?” Hayden tells him. “And maybe he left you here because he wanted to give you more quality time with Abigail.” And then, for the second half of his one-two punch, Hayden gets quiet and whispers. “You know, with Starkey off-site, that office he likes to hang out in is empty . . . and very private. . . .”

With that suggestion, all the blood leaves Garson’s brain and goes other places, leaving him with no further questions. Hayden then quickly finds Abigail and assigns her to shuck the thousand ears of corn that showed up in their last shipment, ensuring that she’ll have no time for Garson. Even when Garson joins her, frantically shucking corn to speed up the process, Hayden knows it will take all day. He suspects that Abigail would rather shuck Hayden’s corn in the kitchen than Garson’s in the office.

Hayden walks the floor all morning, taking in the conversations, or lack thereof, trying to get a bead on today’s mood. A mob, he knows, can be as dysfunctional as a family, given a bad enough parent—and Starkey is as dysfunctional as they come. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why so many of these kids have been willing to follow Starkey: He reminds them of home.

“These waffles suck,” says a malcontent stork who said the same thing when they were getting watery powdered eggs that actually did suck. Now the applause department supplies them a much higher quality of food than they could get for themselves. But there are always the complainers.

“Sorry,” Hayden tells him. “The seafood breakfast buffet is tomorrow. I’ll make sure they save you some crab legs and caviar.”

He gives Hayden the finger and continues to scarf down his waffle. Since arriving at the plant two weeks ago, Hayden has not only been in charge of inventory, he’s overseeing food preparation as well, due to the fact that the former kid in charge of the kitchen died in the Horse Creek Harvest Camp attack. It seems all of Hayden’s jobs of late have been the result of terminal vacation of post.

With each harvest camp takedown, the mood among the storks has become progressively more somber and volatile. There have been more threatening glares, more fights over nothing, more issues among kids who had plenty of issues already. The last attack brought a numbness and an indefinable throbbing like the ache of a phantom limb. There is a vacuum left behind by the dead that can’t be filled by the new faces added to their numbers, and there’s no way to predict the names and numbers of the casualties yet to come from their next mission.

Starkey still has his die-hard believers who try to compensate for the plunging morale by screaming and cheering the loudest when he tries to rally them to the fever pitch he feeds on, but their efforts are less and less effective.

“Where are they, Hayden?”

He turns to see a girl loudly dropping her plate into the bus bin next to her table with an angry clatter as the punctuation to her question—although clearly it’s an accusation. This is one of the girls liberated from Cold Springs Harvest Camp, where the director convinced everyone that Hayden was working for the Juvies. Those kids still cling to the belief that Hayden is a traitor. The one saving grace of the haters is that they keep him on his toes, never allowing him to get too complacent or comfortable.

“Where are what?” asks Hayden. “The sausages, you mean? They’re gone, but there’s still plenty of bacon.”

“Don’t play dumb. You said Starkey went with a team, but I’ve been checking around, and the only ones not here are Starkey, Bam, and Jeevan. That’s not the kind of team Starkey would take. If you ask me, I think you have something to do with their disappearance.”

A few other kids have taken notice of this little confrontation. One kid meets eyes with Hayden, rolling his as if to say I’m on your side—these Cold Springs kids are nuts. As more and more are added to their numbers, the voices of the Cold Springs haters mean less and less. In spite of them, Hayden knows he can be a leader here if he wants to. Good thing he doesn’t want to.

“Anyone with half a brain could see that Starkey needs an assault team leader to scope the place out, and a hacker to figure out how to foil the security system,” Hayden tells her, “otherwise more of us could die in the attack.” Hayden makes sure to emphasize the word “die.” Which has the desired affect. Everyone at the accusational girl’s table becomes uncomfortable, as if spiders have just crawled into their laps from beneath the table.

“Why do we have to attack another harvest camp?” asks Elias Dean, one of the mouthier kids. “Haven’t we done enough already?”

Hayden smiles. The fact that kids are voicing their reservations out loud is a very good sign. “Starkey says we’ll keep it up until either the harvest camps are all gone, or we’re all gone.”

More spiders, at more tables. The kind that bite.

“One of these days they’ll be ready for us,” someone else mumbles, “and take us all out before we even get through the gate.”

“Starkey’s a genius and all,” Elias says, “but it’s a little much, don’t you think?”

“Not my job to think, although I occasionally do,” Hayden says. “I’m glad that you do too.” And that’s as far as Hayden will take it. God forbid he be accused of fomenting dissent.

•  •  •

The “reconnaissance team” returns at noon.

“They’re back,” announces a guard running in from his lookout at the rusty front gate of the plant. At first Hayden thinks the plan must have failed—or that maybe Bam and Jeevan scrubbed it, unable to go through with it. Maybe their accomplice, the gardener, never showed to make the capture feel authentic. But when Bam and Jeevan enter, Starkey is not with them—a fact that the lookout was not observant enough to notice.

“Where’s Starkey?” comes the obvious question—not just from one stork, but from many, whispering the question to one another, not daring to ask Bam or Jeevan. The storks are afraid. They’re hopeful. They’re angry. They are filled with too many emotions to sort.

Hayden approaches Bam and Jeevan with caution, knowing he’s being watched, knowing that all three of them are being measured in the moment.

“Don’t tell me—you got stranded in a mountain pass, and had to do like the Donner party,” Hayden says. “If you ate Starkey, I hope you saved me some breast meat.”

“You’re not funny,” Bam says, loudly enough for Hayden to know it’s for show. “We were ambushed by parts pirates. We’re lucky we’re still in one piece.” She hesitates as more kids drift into hearing range, drawn by the curious gravity of tragedy. “They recognized Starkey, so they tranq’d Jeevan and me, and left us there. When we came to, Starkey was gone. They took him.”

No gasps, no cries, just silence. Jeevan tries to slip away, not wanting to be within this little center of attention, but Bam holds him tightly by the shoulder, preventing him from leaving.

“Starkey’s gone?” asks one of the youngest, smallest storks—one whom Hayden recalls having trouble wielding his weapon at the last takedown.

“I’m sorry,” says Bam. “There was nothing we could do.”

And to Hayden’s amazement, Bam’s eyes begin to cloud with tears. Either she’s far better at deception than Hayden ever gave her credit for, or at least part of her emotion is real.

“What do we do?” someone asks.

“We go on without him,” Bam says with subtle authority. “Gather everyone on the turbine floor. We have decisions to make.”

Word quickly spreads, and the somber sense of hopelessness lifts as everyone begins to grapple with the idea of a world without Starkey. The three girls in his personal harem alternate between comforting and sniping at one another. They are inconsolable, but they are the only ones. Even Garson DeGrutte and Starkey’s other supporters have quickly overcome their grief, and are now promoting themselves, jockeying for a leadership position in the new hierarchy. But when Bam addresses the storks later that morning, she’s a commanding presence that makes it clear who’s in charge. No one has the audacity to challenge her authority. From here on in, all the jockeying will be for positions beneath her leadership.

She doesn’t so much give a speech as tell everyone how it is. It’s not a rallying hyperbole-filled war cry like Starkey might have delivered, just a bracing dose of harsh, heavy reality. She drives three key points home:

“We’re a fugitive mob of unwanted kids with a price on our heads.”

“Our friends, the clappers, are worse than our enemies.”

“If we’re going to stay whole and alive, we’re going to have to stop taking down harvest camps, and disappear. Now.”

And although there are some who bluster about vengeance, and what Starkey would want, those voices are weak and find no resonance among the storks. With Bam’s declaration, their suicide run has ended, and their new mission is to live. Hard to argue with survival.

“Well done,” Hayden tells her, catching her alone in one of the ammunition storerooms. “Are you going to tell me what really happened?”

“You know what happened. Your plan happened, and he fell right into it, just like you said he would.”

Bam tells him about the video, carefully recorded and duplicated, and stashed in various virtual locations like defensive nukes, should Starkey launch an offensive.

“Are you really sure he won’t just come right back here?” Bam asks.

Although nothing is ever 100 percent, Hayden is pretty sure. “In the battle between ego and vengeance, Starkey’s ego wins. His image is more important than his need to get back at you. He might try, but not until he he’s scrounged himself up a new murder of storks to follow him.”

She gives him the sneering curl of her lip that feels less intimidating than it used to. “It pisses me off that you know him better than I do.”

“I’m a savant when it comes to character judgment,” he tells her. “For instance, most people wouldn’t see anything in you besides attitude and a need for stronger deodorant, but I think you can handle the storks almost as well as Connor handled the Graveyard.”

Bam gives him a halfhearted glare. “Can you ever give a compliment without also making it an insult?”

“No,” he admits. “Not possible. It’s the essence of my charm.”

Bam turns to restack some of the weapons piled in the room, and Hayden helps her, checking to make sure that they are all unloaded and safeties are in place. Can’t be too careful when it comes to deadly automatic firepower.

Bam pauses for a moment, looking at the weapons piled before them. “There’s no question that power blew out Starkey’s brain,” Bam says, “but what he did . . . it wasn’t all bad. We have more than five hundred kids who would have been unwound, and that doesn’t even count the nonstorks we freed from those harvest camps.”

Although Hayden isn’t big on apologetics for tyrants, he offers her the benefit of a shrug. “Maybe in the big picture the end justifies the means, and maybe not. All I know for sure is that no one else is going to be hanged, shot, or otherwise executed for Mason Starkey’s version of justice. And don’t forget we just prevented a major massacre of innocent kids.”

“Who will now be unwound on schedule,” Bam reminds him.

“But not by us.”

Several storks come into the storeroom to deposit their weapons. Bam thanks them, and they hurry out, relieved to make the guns someone else’s problem. The plan is to keep only enough weapons for defense, should defense be needed. The rest will be left behind when they leave the power plant—and they’ll have to leave soon. Once the bigwigs in the applause department know that Starkey is gone, it’s anyone’s guess what they’ll do. Perhaps descend from the skies in a mass of unmarked helicopters and snuff them all. Hayden wouldn’t put it past them.

“I’ve pegged Garson DeGrutte as my second-in-command, since you’ve made it clear you don’t want the position,” Bam says.

“You’re kidding me!”

“He was a nuisance under Starkey, but he respects authority and follows orders. With Starkey out of the picture, I think he’ll be an asset. And besides, we’ve got to keep him busy now that Abigail broke up with him.”

Hayden laughs. “Shucking corn can kill any relationship.” Then he finds himself getting uncharacteristically serious. “So what’s next?” he asks, because his plan for the Stork Brigade only went so far as Starkey’s removal.

“I have storks working on finding us somewhere safe,” Bam tells him. “There are lots of places to hide. We’ll find one, hunker down, and make it work.”

“I wish you luck,” Hayden tells her.

She eyes him with the old suspicion. “You’re not coming with us?”

Hayden presents her with an overexaggerated sigh. “As much as I would enjoy being éminence gris to your striking figurehead, it’s time I left for greener pastures. Actually, I’ve been considering setting out with a small crew of my own and reestablishing my broadcast radio show, since the podcasts keep being squelched by the Juvenile Authority a few hours after I post them.”

Bam laughs at that. “Hayden, your broadcast never reached beyond the Graveyard, and even then, no one was listening but you.”

“Yes, I do love to hear myself talk—but I think I can get a wider audience with the help of Jeevan and a few choice members of a special-ops team. We’ll be the Verbal Strike Force. VSF, for short, because initials are always much more impressive.”

Bam shakes her head. “You’re an odd bird, Hayden.”

“This coming from a stork named Bambi.”

Bam offers him a genuine smile. Something he’s rarely seen. “Call me that again,” she says, “and I’ll deck you.”

30 • Starkey

It’s night when he regains consciousness. The tranqs stole the whole day from him. He’s shivering from a mild but constant rain and is near hypothermia, but he forces clarity to his thoughts. He knows his actions now are crucial if he’s going to overcome this new dire circumstance. He borrows heat from his burning emotions to drag warmth into his body. The adrenaline of anger.

One would think that to be dethroned—to be torn from power—would bring unbearable humiliation . . . but not to Mason Michael Starkey. Perhaps because the core of his being has taken on a potent yin-yang of ambition swirled into righteous indignation. Those driving forces have become the essence of who he is, and they leave no room for humiliation. All Starkey can feel is fury at the betrayal, and a burning desire to reclaim the leadership that is rightfully his. The leadership he has earned. Treason is the highest crime of any culture, and he is determined to make the traitors pay.

He will lead the storks once more. Maybe not today, but soon. He’ll have to bide his time. He has the money and the power of the clapper movement behind him, and he knows how to contact them, so he is not without hope, or friends. Dandrich gave him a phone number to use in case of emergency, and he can think of no emergency greater than this.

But first things first. Right now, he’s got to get himself out of the cold. He must find some sort of shelter. In his darkest moments, he never dreamed he’d be thrust back into basic survival mode again. They’ve taken everything away from me, he thinks, but he strangles the thought before it can take hold. He despises those who feel sorry for themselves. He will not stoop so low.

He knows it won’t be easy for him now. He’s America’s most wanted. There’s nowhere he can go where he won’t be recognized instantly. He’ll be prey for anyone with a phone, looking to cash in on the huge reward being offered for his capture. Now the price on his head is far greater than the value his adoptive parents ever saw in him.

His future will all come down to a phone. The first one he sees will be either his salvation or his ruin depending on who gets to dial it first: him or the phone’s owner, who will most certainly be calling the police.

Still dizzy from the tranqs, he makes his way through the woods to a highway, forcing his stiff legs to walk at a brisk pace, generating body heat, but still shivering with every step. A mile and a half up the road, he comes to a service area and hurries into the glorious warmth of a convenience store. He quickly sizes up the people there. A grisly looking clerk, a family deciding on snacks, and an old man in filthy jeans trying to scrounge up enough coins for a lottery ticket. No one looks at him as he slips into the bathroom and locks the door behind him. He sits on the toilet, fully clothed, too dehydrated to even pee, and gets his shivering under control. It takes longer than he thought it would, and finally the clerk bangs on the door.

“You okay in there, dude?”

“Yeah, I’ll be out in a second.”

He takes another minute, flexing the fingers of his good hand, and stands, noting that the last of his tranq vertigo has worn off. Then he steps back out into the convenience store, where another family argues about snacks, and a woman baffled by the coffee machine tries to figure out which is decaf and which is regular. The clerk is busy ringing up a fat man’s gas, and Starkey gets down to business.

He goes outside, where the fat man’s car waits, the gas hose still in the tank. Lo and behold, there’s a phone plugged into a charger on the console inside. Starkey opens the door, but as he reaches for the phone, a kid in the shadows of the backseat yells, “Hey! Get outta here! Dad! Help!”

Starkey flinches, but it’s too late to abort.

“Sorry, kid.” He grabs the phone, disconnecting it from the charger, but the kid continues to scream, and the father bursts out of the shop.

Starkey curses himself for the clumsiness of the theft. As a magician, he always prided himself on his ability to slip things like watches, wallets, and phones in and out of pockets without being noticed. It’s demoralizing to be so desperate that he must steal so inelegantly.

With the man taking chase, Starkey sprints into the dark brushy field behind the convenience store, continuing to run long after the cries of the kid and his furious but ponderously slow father can no longer be heard.

When he’s sure he’s too far away to be seen or followed, he checks the phone. For a moment, he thinks its interface is locked and he won’t be able to use it, but luckily, the man was not expecting his phone to be taken from the safety of his vehicle. Starkey pulls up a dial screen and keys in the emergency number he’d been given. It rings twice, then a nondescript voice answers the phone with a standard, “Hello?”

“This is Mason Starkey,” he says. “Something’s happened. I need help.”

He quickly explains the situation as best he can in a single breath. And calmly the voice on the other end of the line says, “Stay where you are. We’ll come to you.”

Following the instructions he’s given, Starkey keeps the phone powered on, to be used as a homing beacon, and within an hour, a helicopter descends from the night sky like the proverbial stork to carry him to a place of greater safety.

•  •  •

Starkey has no idea where he’s been taken. It’s a city. That’s all he knows. He’s not so sophisticated as to know the silhouettes of a skyline at the earliest hint of dawn. All he knows for sure is that it’s near a large body of water, and that it’s colder than where he was, as evidenced by the blast of chilly air when they open the helicopter door and escort him from the rooftop heliport. It’s a tall building, but not the tallest. Average, as far as skyscrapers go.

He knew the clapper movement was well funded and well organized, but to have such headquarters in plain sight gives Starkey pause for thought. In his own imagination, the clapper movement was far grittier and more counterculture. Hiding, perhaps in the dangerous backrooms of questionable clubs. That they have their own office building, however, is somehow more unsettling. The logo on the building—he saw it as the helicopter approached—is a simple design he did not recognize. It featured the initials “PC,” which seem fairly generic and could stand for a great many things.

He’s escorted down a flight of stairs and into an elevator by two men in dark suits with chests too well developed for them to be anything but security boeufs. The elevator takes him down to the thirty-seventh floor, and he’s brought to a conference room with black leather chairs and a long table of blue marble. No one is present.

“Wait here,” one of the guards says. “Someone will be along shortly.”

The room has only one door, which the men lock as they exit, leaving him alone. There are east-facing floor-to-ceiling windows, but they’re made of the kind of frosted glass that diffuses light while denying a view. Translucent rather than transparent. The rising sun is little more than a golden haze.

He was alone in the helicopter, too. The pilot, sequestered in the cockpit, never spoke to him after letting him into the craft, other than to say, “Buckle in.” The fact that they sent him a rescue craft so quickly, and that they’ve placed him in such a richly appointed room of their inner sanctum, tells Starkey that he’s respected and valued. And yet, there’s unease in him as diffuse and ill-defined as the light coming through the frosted windows.

•  •  •

No one comes.

After an hour, he tries, without luck, to jimmy the door lock using a paper clip he found on the floor. Despite his skill with locks, he can’t pick this one.

“Hey!” he yells. “I’m still here in case you forgot! Someone get your ass over here and let me out!”

He begins pounding on the door, trying to create enough of a commotion that someone will come to shut him up. Nothing. It’s as if the entire floor is deserted. Or maybe soundproof. Furious, he begins knocking over chairs, making a racket, but if, indeed, no one’s there to hear him, all the sound and fury will signify nothing. Finally, not wanting to be found the author of this particular chaos, he sets the chairs back where he found them and, exhausted, sits down and cradles his head in his arms on the table. He falls asleep in moments.

He dreams of Bam. She’s laughing at him. She’s goading the others to laugh at him as well, and although he fires a machine gun at her, nothing comes out but flower petals and jelly beans and popcorn, and that just makes everyone laugh even more. Then Hayden grabs the machine gun away from him and shoves the muzzle so far up his nose he can feel it in his brain. “That’ll clear your sinuses,” Hayden says, and the laughter all around feels like it can fill a stadium.

He’s gently shaken awake by a hand on his shoulder and pulled mercifully out of the dream.

“Mr. Starkey?”

He looks up bleary eyed to see a well-groomed man with a tightly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. Dandrich.

“About time,” Starkey croaks.

“I gave orders that you be taken somewhere to rest until I arrived,” he says kindly. “Orders, however, are often left to interpretation.”

“Someone should be fired.”

Dandrich considers it. “Or at least reprimanded. Be that as it may, I hope you got some rest. You must be exhausted from your triumphant efforts.”

Starkey rolls the kink out of his neck while the man pours him a glass of water from a crystal pitcher that wasn’t there before. “What is this place?”

Dandrich hands him the glass. “It’s what is commonly called ‘an undisclosed location’.”

“It seems pretty disclosed to me if it’s right in the middle of a city.”

“It’s not only AWOLs who can disappear in an urban environment, my friend,” he says, sitting down casually beside Starkey. “To city dwellers, most buildings, no matter how large, are merely obstacles between home and office. In a city, convenience and anonymity go hand in hand. But we’re not here to talk about our headquarters, are we?”

“There’s a team of traitors.” Starkey says, getting to the point. “We need to take them out if we’re going to save the Stork Brigade.”

Dandrich does not seem troubled. “A coup is always an unfortunate thing. Unless, of course, you are the one staging it.”

Starkey thinks of the coup he staged at the Graveyard. What goes around comes around, but the timing couldn’t have been worse

“It’s not a surprise that after the festivities at Horse Creek Harvest Camp, a number of storks would become disenchanted,” his benefactor says.

“They invented an incriminating recording, but with your help I can convince everyone it’s a fake. Send me back there with more firepower. I’ll get control again, and rally them to the cause.”

“No need.” Dandrich says. “Your last few attacks have been so successful, we’ve decided that no further action on your part is needed.”

“But what about Mousetail?”

“Unnecessary. It would be anticlimactic after what you did at Horse Creek. You were brilliant there,” he says with a smile. Then his smile drifts neutral. “You were brilliant, but now you’re done.”

Starkey shakes his head. “There are still ninety-two harvest camps out there. You need me to take them down.”

“Mason, you forget that it’s not our purpose to take down every harvest camp.”

Starkey stands up. “Well, it’s my purpose!”

Now Dandrich’s expression becomes icy. “We are not in the business of indulging adolescent power fantasies.”

Even though the man is scrawny and at the weak end of middle age, Starkey finds himself intimidated by his unflinching gaze.

“So that’s it? You’re done with me? You’re just going to cast me out into the street?”

Dandrich laughs at the suggestion, and his expression softens again. “No, of course not. We would never abandon someone as valuable as you. You can still serve our cause.”

“To hell with your cause! What about my cause?”

“A wise general knows when his campaign has run its course.” Then he raises his hands in broad sweeping gestures as he speaks. “Look at what you’ve done! Be satisfied that you made yourself the legend that you always dreamed you could be. That you freed hundreds of Unwinds. That you saved so many storks and struck a blow for what you believe.”

Maybe he’s right, but Starkey can’t stand the thought that he was cast out, and now is being denied the right of vengeance. He slams his fist on the table. “They need to pay for what they’ve done!”

Dandrich never loses his cool. “They will. In time.”

Starkey calms himself down. Patience was his strongest asset at the Graveyard. When did he lose it? He takes a deep breath, then another. If he can belay his thirst for revenge, it will be all the more satisfying and devastating when it comes. The betrayal has not undone his good work. He has to remember that. And in this strange organization that espouses the virtues of chaos and mayhem, he will find his place. Here, too, he will find ways of setting gears into motion, just as he did at the Graveyard.

“You’ve been the subject of much discussion,” Dandrich says, “and we’ve decided that your greatest potential lies in our fund-raising division.”

“Fund-raising?”

“There are people who would like to get to know you on a close, personal level,” he says. “Important people. Some very wealthy, some very powerful.”

“So . . . you’re going to introduce me to these people?”

“Not personally, but I assure you, you will be in good hands.” He opens the door, where two more beefy men in suits await. “My associates here will escort you to your new assignment.” Then he shakes Starkey’s hand. “Thank you for all you’ve done. I’m glad that our paths crossed, and that, for a time, our objectives complemented each other. Take care, Mason.” And then he leaves Starkey with the two burly men, who lead him back to the elevator.