Bethany managed a smile. “Hey, we had to get lucky with something.”
Travis wondered about that. Wondered if it was really luck, or if Yuma’s climate was part of why the place had mattered when the world shut down.
Twenty minutes later they touched down in Imperial, a neat arrangement of neighborhood grids surrounded by miles of irrigated farmland and then more miles of open desert.
They walked out of the terminal into baked air—107 degrees, according to a digital sign over the parking lot.
They rented a Jeep Wrangler with an open top, picked up Interstate 8 at the south end of town, and headed east toward Yuma. Five minutes later they passed the last of the irrigated fields and came into the emptiest landscape Travis had ever seen. At even a glance it was more desolate than the scrublands around Border Town, which was saying something. The highway bore straight ahead through it, just south of dead east. Far ahead were low hills and a line of mountains—some southern range of the Rockies—that lay probably just north of Yuma, forty-some miles away.
Travis was driving. Paige sat in the passenger seat, reassembling the twelve-gauge.
Bethany leaned forward from the backseat, her hair going crazy in the wind. “Want to hear the bios on our two friends in the green building?”
Paige glanced back at her and nodded.
Bethany looked at her phone’s display as she began. “Raymond Muller. Guy on the ninth floor. Forty-two years old. Got his masters in political science from Brown, and in the next two decades he worked for half the power players in D.C.”
“Doing what?” Travis said.
“Connecting them all to one another would be my guess,” Bethany said. “I used to run into people like that in my field. Professional networkers. Matchmakers for senators and representatives and every kind of mega-corporation. A little closer to the vest than lobbyists. Muller worked for an Appropriations Committee chairman, two Ways and Means chairmen, Raytheon, General Dynamics, GE, Intel, FedEx, and Pfizer at one time or another.”
“That’s a lot to cram into twenty years,” Paige said.
“Actually he crammed it into fifteen. His resume goes blank in 2006, right around the time the high-rise on M Street is built. If Muller has any income beyond that point, I can’t find it. It may be that the company has made all his purchases for him these past five years. And that’s it, for him.”
There was a long silence as she pulled up the information on the second man.
“Isaac Finn,” she said. She exhaled, the sound edged with a laugh. “You’re not gonna believe this guy’s background.”
“Try us,” Travis said.
“Relief work.”
Paige turned in her seat. “What?”
“He’s fifty-five. He has no formal education beyond high school. He graduated in 1973 and went straight into the Peace Corps, qualifying for it based on years of charity work in his teens. Stayed in the Corps for ten years, then came back to the States and spent a year rounding up financing to create his own organization, For Good International. At its peak, the group had over five thousand volunteers and paid staff, and an endowment of about seventy million dollars.”
“Are you sure this isn’t a different Isaac Finn?” Paige said.
Bethany double-clicked something on her phone. “Here’s his passport photo.” She handed the phone to Paige.
“That’s him,” Paige said. She stared at it a moment longer. She looked like she was trying to align the new information with what little she’d already known about the man. She gave it up after a few seconds and handed the phone back.
Bethany clicked to the bio information again. Her eyes roamed over it.
“He structured his group—and his approach—based on things he’d learned in the Corps. He’d seen that famines were generally not caused by weather, but by conflict, and the resulting breakdown of infrastructure. So his organization would try to reestablish stability in certain places, strengthen key communities in the hope that others around them would follow suit. He gave it a hell of a try, and he wasn’t shy about using outside-the-box methods. He brought in psychological profilers to study the local leadership within villages, trying to determine which ones were cut out for actual governing, as opposed to just hoarding power. Then Finn would put his financial support behind the good guys, try to steer things onto the right track. He’d even apply that kind of thinking to entire communities. Try to exclude troublemakers, and empower those with certain basic attributes: kindness, concern for others, aversion to violence. Just anything to jump-start stability in enough places, and try to get the broader infrastructure back on its feet. Worth a shot, I guess.”