Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Does it have electricity? Cable?”

“Nothing. But the country has a president you can do business with. He was president of the coca growers’ association when he got elected. Did he stop being president of the association? No way! That’s what I call style. President of Bolivia and the coca growers’ association. He screwed me on the lithium thing, but it was the right thing to do if you were him. And now he owes me. I can make the introduction. I can lease you Los Volcanes for a dollar a year. Throw in ten million for infrastructure improvements and operating expenses — you’ll want to lay a fiber-optic line.”

“Why would you do this for me?”

“You need a secure base. I need black-swan insurance. Belize is working for me now, gotta love the police here, but we’re still pre-Singularity. If people like you and me are going to re-create the world, we may need a place where we can ride out transitional disruptions. Also, I don’t see Greenland melting down before the Singularity, but if it does, nuclear weaponry could be utilized. We’ve backed away from nuclear-winter capability, but there could still be a nuclear autumn, a nuclear November, in which case the equator’s where you want to be. Isolated valley in the center of an untargeted continent. Make sure you’ve got some comely young females, some spare parts, some goats and chickens. You can make the place cozy. I’d hate to have to join you there, but it could happen.”

Tad stopped talking to stab at his fish and consume it with distrustful, snapping lunges with his mouth. Then he pushed his plate away as if disavowing something shameful.

“I’m not sure how to say this except bluntly,” Andreas said, “or why I’m bothering to say it with your cameras sending this conversation to the cloud. But it would be important to me that no one know where the money is coming from.”

Tad frowned. “Do I embarrass you?”

“No, of course not. I think we understand each other. But I have my own identity in the world, and … how to say this? Your legal troubles don’t mesh well with it.”

“My legal troubles are nothing compared to yours, my friend.”

“I violated German official-secrets law and American anti-hacking law. That plays well even in the mainstream media. Certainly better than a sex charge.”

“The old media live to smear me. I am the Primary Disruptor, and they know it.”

“I get some of that, too. Which is why—”

“Of all the antenimbusian systems, the legal system is the most intellectually offensive to me. ‘One size fits all’—my God. It’s even worse than brick-and-mortar commerce. Why on earth, when we have the computing power to individually tailor everything else, do people still think the law should apply equally to everyone? Not every fifteen-year-old is alike, believe me. And am I exactly the same as every other sixty-four-year-old male?”

“It’s an interesting point.”

“And the rules of evidence — it’s not a search for truth, it’s an affront to truth. I have the truth, I have it recorded. And the lawyers cover their ears with their hands, literally cover their ears, and tell me they don’t want to hear about it. Can a system be any more fubar than that? I am counting the days until a ‘trial’ consists of nothing more than sitting down and viewing the digital truth.”

“But in the meantime…”

“It’s fine,” Tad said, somewhat crossly. “You can keep my name out of it. The Volcanes place is registered to a Bolivian corporation I set up to get around their foreign-ownership nonsense. There’s three layers of shell there. The Bolivian entity can disburse the money.”

“You really don’t mind?”

“We’re both truth-tellers, but I’m the more radical one. I have the guts to look you in the eye and tell you that your form of truth-telling is lesser than mine. But you’re more likable. You can be truth-telling’s friendlier public face.”

“Sounds good to me,” Andreas said.

The bad incident occurred after he and Tad had walked out to the compound’s main gate. Not seeing the Escalade there, Tad phoned the driver, who said he was returning from a gas station. A few minutes later, as the gate was opening inward and the Escalade coming through it, a bald man with a camera, a gringo in a many-pocketed khaki vest, popped out from behind a palm tree across the road. He auto-fired at least ten shots of Andreas and Tad, with Tad’s house behind them, before Andreas took cover behind the Escalade.

How could he have been so stupid as to stand in plain sight? It was bad, and it got worse. Tad had assumed a firing stance, aiming his revolver at the photographer, whose shutter Andreas continued to hear clucking. “Drop the camera, asshole,” Tad shouted. “You think I wouldn’t do it? You think I’m afraid?”

The gun was surprisingly unsteady. Tad’s driver jumped out of the Escalade, looking bewildered. There was a scuffle of footsteps from the road. Tad lowered the gun and ran to the cages along the wall by the gate and released two of his Rottweilers.

Thus endeth my run of good luck , Andreas thought.

He and the driver followed Tad through the gate and watched the dogs tearing up the road after the photographer. This was the point at which the Killer made its presence known. The photographer stumbled against a parked minivan, and the dogs caught up with him and lunged without hesitation, one of them biting his arm, the other his leg. Andreas found himself hoping the dogs would kill him.

Tad was hustling up the road with his gun.

Andreas got in the Escalade and told the driver to do the same. By the time they were through the gate, the dogs were mewling and staggering — the photographer must have pepper-sprayed them — and the minivan was heading straight at Tad, who seemed to have lost interest in confrontation. He wandered off the road, his gun hanging loosely in his hand. The driver had to jerk the wheel of the Escalade to avoid collision with the minivan.

“Turn around and follow him,” Andreas said.

The driver nodded, not very happily, and didn’t hurry. By the time he’d turned the vehicle around, the road was empty. “He’s gone,” he said, as if this settled the matter.

Apparently nothing had changed. The Killer hadn’t gone anywhere. Andreas felt like a dreamer awakening to an existence that had grown all the more desperate in the decade he’d been happily asleep. Instead of love, he had fame. Instead of a wife or children or real friends, like the friend Tom Aberant could have been, he had Tad Milliken. He was alone with the Killer.

He instructed the driver to take him to the nearest clinic. The photographer’s minivan was parked outside it. Drops of fresh blood on the asphalt led to a red smear on the linoleum inside the door. Two Belizean women and four sick children were in the waiting room.

“I need to see my friend,” Andreas told the receptionist. “The one who was bitten.”

This being Belize, he was ushered right in to an examination room where a young doctor was cleaning a gnarly wound, one of several, on the photographer’s arm. “Please wait outside,” the doctor said without looking up.

The photographer, on his back, rolled his head toward Andreas. His eyes widened.

“I’m a friend,” Andreas said. “I want to make this right.”

“Your friend tried to kill me.”

“I’m sorry. He’s insane.”

“You think?”

“Please wait outside,” the doctor said.

The camera was sitting on a chair. Easy enough to walk away with it, but the pictures were only part of the problem. Money would have helped with the rest of the problem, but he was famed for having none. Famed for the Gandhian simplicity of his existence, the suitcase and briefcase in which his earthly possessions fit. Mostly this worked in his favor, but it wasn’t working now.