He hangs up, hands the phone back. Astrid puts it in her jacket pocket. Sometimes when she wakes in the morning, there are bite marks on her stomach. She has the feeling of cold eyes watching her in the bathroom. She tells herself they’re spider bites, that the feeling of being watched is just that, a feeling. But Astrid has always felt that Mobley is something more than human. For her the feeling is secular—this is a man with the genetic superiority of a billionaire. Money and power coat him in a blanket of invulnerability. They cloak him with power in its purest form, the power to make anyone do anything, to influence governments, to bring corporations to their knees. She has heard others refer to him as a wizard in reverential tones. This is just their supernatural brains, she thinks, trying to deify something beyond their comprehension. What does the word even mean anymore? Who are the wizards of modern life? Technology nerds. Boys with pocket protectors you call when you can’t print.
Mobley is an emperor, a centibillionaire, worth one hundred billion dollars—$100,000,000,000. A man with more personal wealth than the annual GDP of Cuba or Ethiopia or Guatemala, Oman or Kenya or Luxembourg. A man worth twice the GDP of Slovenia and Lithuania, three times the GDP of Yemen and Latvia and Cameroon. Each of his billions = 100 x $100,000,000—itself a sum so large as to be achieved by only five thousand Americans. Each hundred million is in turn made up of individual millions, more money than most human beings on Planet Earth earn in a lifetime. Astrid looks over. Mobley is on her phone, reviewing photos of young women on an app he’s had designed—photos fed into the system by recruiters all over the country.
He has more money than 7,800,000,000 people. What does that make her boss, if not a god?
*
They reach the Palm Springs estate at 2:00 a.m., their SUVs covered in thick black soot. It is a thirty-acre compound on the edge of a suburban neighborhood, walled on all sides, with a main gate and one for deliveries behind the guest house. There is a tennis court, a stable, and a palatial pool, as well as a putting green and a helipad. The main house is over ten thousand square feet. There are two guard houses, one on the north side, the other on the south.
A six-thousand-square-foot pink adobe guest house sits near the western wall, surrounded by palm trees and cacti. In addition to Mobley’s advance security team, there are sixteen security goblins from Gabe’s firm. Legolas and Aragorn have seniority. They meet Mobley’s SUV as it pulls in.
“Orci the senior gave us the lay of the land,” Legolas tells Mobley. “We’ve mounted additional security cameras around the neighborhood and set up a mobile command center behind the stables. I took the initiative to bring on a drone team at no additional cost.”
Mobley doesn’t answer, just walks across the Italian paving stones and into the main house, taking a glass of cucumber water from his Korean majordomo. Astrid puts herself in front of Legolas, insulating her boss from the details.
“I’ll expect hourly updates,” she says, “night and day.”
In the distance, she sees Boaz Orci pull Bathsheba out of the rear SUV and walk her to the guest house.
“We’ll need a dedicated security team for our guest,” Astrid tells the goblins. “They’ve already come for her once.”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Aragorn. He’ll be the day commander. Legolas will run the night shift. And both will coordinate with Liam Orci, who leads the Orc security detail.
The estate is surrounded on three sides by desert, giving them good visibility, but the shared wall with the gated community could be a problem. Mobley built the estate fifteen years ago, before this neighborhood of McMansions—envy-green multimillionaires with their air of superiority. What do they know about true wealth? He has been to this estate twice in fifteen years. Despite that, there is a full staff working daily to keep the grounds and facilities in top condition, should the billionaire ever choose to fly in on a whim, but the truth is, most of the employees have never seen his face.
*
This time Bathsheba gets a whole house to herself. Before she arrived, the staff removed the cutlery and glass. They took down the curtain rods. There is a suicide epidemic in America, they reasoned. Who knew how it spread? So all the furniture has been removed except for one bed and a table in the dining room with a single chair. Orci lays out the rules as he shows her around.
“The kitchen’s off-limits,” he says. “Meals will be prepared and brought to you from the main house. You’ll notice all the doors have been removed. This is to ensure a clean line of sight for the cameras. If you need anything, just say it out loud. Someone will be listening.”
He leads her into the bedroom, puts her suitcase on the floor.
“You like this job?” she asks him.
He looks around. The closet is empty and doorless. The toilet seat has been removed from the bathroom, as has the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet.
“I’m a fan of clarity,” he says.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning tell me what you need and I’ll do it. Meaning, pay me X amount for Y scenario.”
“And you don’t care that he’s evil? That Y scenario is you kidnapping a pregnant woman?”
Orci sits on her suitcase. “Did you know that air pollution protects the Earth? Keeps it from getting hotter? I mean, it’s getting hotter, that’s just—go outside. The state’s on fire. But I’m saying aerosol pollution, what they call aerosol pollution, is keeping our planet cool by reflecting sunlight back into outer space.”
“You’re making that up.”
“No. I heard it on Joe Rogan. So, you tell me—all the terrible things in the world, are they really that bad?”
“He fucks children.”
“Half of India is fucking children. Haven’t you ever heard of arranged marriages and child brides? The age of consent is a construct, like voting. You think it’s science? You think an eighteen-year-old is really more qualified to vote than a seventeen-year-old? Show me the science.”
“I feel like I’m sitting here and watching you masturbate.”
“Sorry. That’s not in the cards for us, sweetheart. I’ve got boundaries.”