“My brother. Older.”
That couldn’t be. Epstein had had an older brother, a normal, but he’d died a dozen years ago in a car crash. “Wait. You faked his death?”
“Yes.”
“But that was before anyone knew about you. Before you made your fortune.”
“Yes.”
“Are you telling me you two planned this twelve years ago?”
“Together we are Erik Epstein. I live in the data. And he is what people want to see. Better at talking to them.” Epstein twitched his hands through his hair again. “Here.” He gestured, and a vivid image appeared. The office upstairs, but from a different angle. Shannon in the chair, saying something. The lawyer, Kobb, shaking his head. Millicent hunch-shouldered, lost in her game. A security camera?
No; the angle was wrong. It was the view from behind the desk. The room as viewed by the hologram. By the other Erik Epstein.
“Do you see? We share eyes.”
The enormity of it. For more than a decade, the world had watched one Erik Epstein, heard him talk on CNN, followed his political maneuverings to establish New Canaan, tracked his corporate takeovers, seen him board private jets. All the while, the real Erik Epstein had been out of sight. Living in this basement, this dark cave of wonders.
He wondered if anyone in the DAR knew it. If the president knew it.
“But…why? Why not just stay out of sight?”
“Too hard. Too many questions. People want to see.” He said it nervously. “I like people. I understand them. But it would have been too hard. I didn’t want press conferences. I wanted to work in the data. Do you know what Michelangelo said?”
Cooper blinked, thrown by the change in topic. “Umm.”
“‘In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.’” The words running together. When he finished, again Epstein fell silent, waiting.
Whatever this is, it’s important. One of the most powerful men on the planet is showing you a secret that at best a handful of people know. There’s a reason.
Cooper paused and then said, “The way Michelangelo saw marble, that’s how you saw the stock market.”
“Yes. No. Not just that. Everything. Data.” He turned and waved his arms in an intricate series of gestures. The whole room reacted, shimmering and twisting, a psychedelic light show of charts and numbers and moving graphs. A new set of data appeared. “Here. You see?”
Cooper stared, tracked from chart to chart. Tried to make sense of what he was looking at. Do what you do. Find the patterns the way you can assemble a picture of someone’s life from their apartment.
Population figures. Resource usage. A time-lapse of Wyoming from above, taken over years, the brown wasteland sprouting a neat geometric pattern of cities and roads. A three-dimensional chart of the incidents of violence in Northern Ireland mapped against the number of British pubs and the average attendance figures of churches. “New Canaan.”
“Obvious.” Impatient.