“Dollars?” says Louise.
“We take Bitcoin,” says a girl they call Katniss, her black hair pinched in pigtails.
The Prophet puts his hand on Simon’s back. “He’s good for it,” he says.
Simon turns. “Me?”
The Prophet meets his eye. “No one ever said redemption was free.”
Goblins
Gabe Lin is a big believer in advertising. Announce yourself to the world, he tells people. Declare the man you want to be, and the world will see that man. He started his own private security force twelve months after making detective at Manhattan Vice. Chutzpah, some called it, but he knew the truth. That thought is action. If you visualize something, if you claim it without hesitation, then it is yours. That was when he got his first personalized license plate. It had come to him in a dream one night, the car, the plate, all of it, after he watched The Dark Knight at the local AMC.
A black Dodge Charger with a red racing stripe, the windows tinted as dark as the law allowed. Darker even. What good is being a cop, after all, if you can’t bend the rules a bit?
Goblin, that’s what he would call himself, and that’s what he would call his firm. Picture the license plate—black text on a yellow backing.
G0BL1N.
The rig was so badass that when it all came together, Gabe found himself grinning for weeks, even in the middle of a standard perp beat down. Nightstick out, Collins would dopesmack Gabe in the back of the head and say, What the fuck are you grinning at? And Gabe would turn on him, screw up his face and say—
Why—so—serious?
—the way Heath Ledger said it in the movie. Guttural, possessed. Like a crazy person.
Goblin Security Consultants. He had cards printed the next week. Forget Kinkos. Gabe spent the money to do it right, finding some boho chick with a letterpress and having that shit embossed. Ten years later he is right where he wants to be: on top of the world. Goblin Security is a global concern with offices in London, Jakarta, Rome. They provide body men for Fortune 100 CEOs, Hollywood celebrities, you name it. All because of Big Client One (BC1), as Gabe calls Ty Oliver, CEO of Rise Pharmaceutical. The first fat cat to take a chance on an arrogant New York City cop with a dream. And that shit Gabe Lin never took for granted. For the first five years he went above and beyond, available twenty-four hours a day. He brought in extra guys, paid them out of his own pocket, recruited handsome young killers straight out of Special Forces. They wore slim-fitted suits with stretch, kept their hair regulation length, even stuck to a stringent skin-care regimen. The key word was aspirational. See, Gabe intuited what other firms hadn’t yet figured out—that personal wealth and the luxury class were going to skyrocket and that the wealthy would shop for security firms the way they shopped for handbags or yachts.
As a fashion accessory.
He could tell the first time Ty rolled into Davos with the goblins at his side that the other CEOs felt suddenly poorer. They looked at their stocky body men with their rubber earwigs and black Kmart athleisure shoes and saw the profound lack of style that signaled you were on your way out. Whereas Ty, with his advance team of Benetton models all wearing the latest in lightweight tactile fabrics, biceps straining against the weave, with their futuristic communications gear and ceramic handguns seemed like the Wrath of fucking Khan. A pre-vision of the gleaming Star Trek future. It was all uphill from there. Cutting-edge. Gabe was the first to recruit all-female teams—former softball MVPs, WNBA pros, and ex-helicopter pilots who walked the line between grace and power.
Feministas, he called them. His warrior princesses.
Three years after Gabe printed those first business cards, Goblin Securities went from two clients to fifteen. Eighteen months later they opened their first overseas office. On Sundays Gabe would go to his Long Island mega-church and throw his hands in the air. Praise Jesus, he’d sing, for investment yields dividend, for praise gets you that raise. The money he donated helped build a Chick-fil-A in the lobby and fund Bible study groups for a decade. Forget the Old Testament with its dour preachers and afterlife rewards. This was the Gospel of Earthly Rewards. All prosperity, no waiting.
And all of it, thanks to BC1. So when Mr. Oliver calls Gabe at 3:00 a.m. on Saturday night and says his son is missing, escaped from his rehab resort in suburban Chicago, Gabe is pedal to the metal in eight minutes flat, running red lights, gunning for the Fifty-Ninth Street bridge, his personal license plate a flashing ultraviolet rectangle.
The G0BL1N is on the move.
*
By 8:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, Gabe Lin and his recon team are on the premises in suburban Illinois—walking the halls of Float Anxiety Abatement Center, past stunned teens and twentysomethings practicing their yoga poses and watercoloring horses in the Meadow of Contentment. He talks to Jacob Wells, the administrator, while Aragorn and Legolas check out the kid’s room. This was another genius move on Gabe’s part, his code name system. All his operatives got the names of heroes from famous fantasy stories—The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Shannara, Xanth. Hell, he even had a kid called Morpheus, another called Neo, and a chick named Trinity. Be larger than life. That’s what he told his crews. For a few months he tried christening some Marvel superheroes, but wouldn’t you know, after they did Super Bowl security for Bob Iger, Disney served him with a cease and desist.
Gabe himself is the Goblin King. Forget that the guy in The Hobbit is like a twelve-foot-tall Elephant-Man-looking motherfucker with a suppurating neck goiter. The name is badass, and Gabe has it engraved on the barrel of his Glock.