Cecelia Ahern - Flawed

Another wall reveals a series of framed qualifications and accolades for a Professor Lambert. I hear a cough behind me and I turn around. Expecting to see a Whistleblower, instead I find a man in a crumpled shirt and jeans standing at yet another door that appeared from nowhere.

“Yes, yes, another secret door. She’s got quite the little rat maze going on down here.” He chuckles. “Bill,” he says, holding out his hand.

He wavers a little as he does this, loses his balance.

As I step closer, I can smell alcohol on his breath. He has gray stubble on his face and looks as though he’s gone a few days sleeping in the same clothes.

“You’re Alpha’s husband,” I say, recognizing him from the photographs.

He chuckles again. “Do you know, there was once a time when she was my wife? Anyway. There was once a time when lots of things were a lot of things. So you’re the one. The One.” He widens his eyes in mock-worship. “She’s been talking about you a great deal.” He studies me and then goes around to his desk and searches through the drawers. It takes him some time, enough for me to study him and the room he has come from. It looks like a kitchen, which no doubt has another door into another room. Why would they have another home buried beneath? In the last drawer he checks, I hear the clink of bottles.

He looks at me in mock-surprise. “Fancy that. Want a drink?”

“We’re not allowed to drink,” I say firmly, noting the branding on his temple.

“Ah, yes.” He chuckles again, and then he whispers, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“The Whistleblowers are upstairs,” I say, astonished by his behavior.

“Oh, yes, the scary whistlers.” He whistles, imitating their sound, and chuckles. “I’m not afraid of them. Are you?” He pours the whiskey into a glass tumbler on a silver tray by the desk and sits down in the leather chair behind the desk. He sinks low.

“I’m afraid of what they’ll do to my granddad.”

“Don’t worry about your granddad. He’s a pro. He’s currently hiding in our morning parlor.” He presses a button under the desk, and the framed photographs disappear to reveal a dozen screens of CCTV images. “Fourth one down, third one in.”

I move closer to the screens and find the room he’s talking about.

“I don’t see anything.”

“See? Told you he was a pro. That bookcase opens; a small, little room; hope he’s not claustrophobic. But he’ll be safe. They won’t find him in there.”

I look at the other screens and see mayhem. People have been lined up; others who rose up against the Whistleblowers are on the ground and have been wounded. Some are being marched out of the building and into vans outside. On one screen I see Alpha standing aside and giving a Whistleblower in charge a firm talking-to.

“Most of them won’t be charged with anything,” he says calmly. “It’s just to scare you all, break it up. And it worked.”

I nod, relieved that Granddad is okay but hoping he’ll be able to hold on until they’re gone.

“What about your tests?” I ask him, curious to know how he gets away with being in his state when he’s Flawed. “Won’t your Whistleblower find traces of alcohol?”

“Us geniuses always pass with flying colors, isn’t that so?” He smiles. “Mathematics is your thing, isn’t it?”

“I hope so.” I don’t know what my job possibilities will be now, now that I’m Flawed. I will never be allowed to rise to any position of power, most likely not as manager, and definitely never any higher.

“You hope. ” He makes a face. “No, don’t use hope. Use your mathematics to get out of this so-called problem.”

I frown. He has definitely drunk too much. “I don’t think math can solve any of my problems now.”

“One of my favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein: ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’” He looks at me, eyes bright. The quote does more for him than it does for me obviously.

I shrug. “I guess.”

“You guess? Mathematicians don’t guess!” he says dramatically, sitting up. “They make an orderly list, they eliminate possibilities, they use direct reasoning. Never guess, my dear. Are you familiar with George Pólya?”

“Of course.”

“I bought a book of his once. I liked his philosophies. You know he said there are four principles to solving a problem. First, you have to understand the problem. After understanding it, you make a plan, then you carry out the plan, then you look back on your work. If this technique fails, which, of course, it often does, Pólya advised, if you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: Find it.”

I smile.

“Thought you’d like that one.”

“You’re a friend of Judge Crevan’s,” I say.

“I am?” he says, surprised. “Where did you hear that nasty rumor from?”

“The photographs.”

“Oh that.” He waves his hand dismissively. “I can safely say I see none of those people anymore. Apart from her, of course.” He looks at the photo of him and Alpha on the beach, both sun-kissed, him cleanly shaven, looking years younger. “And she probably wishes she was one of them. Does Judge Crevan even have friends, might I ask?”

I like him. “Did you work for the Guild?”

“The Guild? No.” He shakes his head. “The government? Yes. Which the Guild works for, too, I might add, though I think they both forget that fact.” He smiles at me. “She says you don’t ask enough questions. I see you’re getting over that part of it. But be careful, sometimes it’s best not to know, because even when you know, it doesn’t matter anyway. Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is often a responsibility nobody wants.” He closes his eyes and lazily leans back in the chair, which tilts under his weight and looks like he’ll fall backward. “She and I don’t agree on that point, of course. Obviously. She always wants to be in the know. She’s got this crusade. I don’t know. Keeps her busy.”

“You don’t believe in her foundation?”

“Foundations are rather wobbly, wouldn’t you agree?” He opens one eye and raises an eyebrow. “If you and I are down here and the rest of them are scrambling around upstairs.” He buries his face in the tumbler again, and the caramel liquid disappears. I actually wish I could join him, from the look of serenity that washes over his face when he’s swallowed it all, but then I think of how Logan forced the beer down my throat and I’m quickly over it.

“He tried to take my house and fortune, you know,” he says. “Crevan. He’s trying to find a way to freeze the assets of the Flawed, take them to fund the Guild. Like they do with criminals. Only we’re not criminals, are we, Celestine?”

I shake my head.

“Good. You remember that. It’s easy to forget sometimes. Though criminals get better treatment than us. As soon as they serve their time, they’re out. We’re like this forever.” This he says without humor. “Did you know Crevan has been paid over one hundred million since the beginning of the Guild? Taxpayers’ money, too. If the public knew that, I think it would be Crevan they boo and hiss in the courtyard and not us. Now, that’s a crime.”

I shake my head, shocked at his earnings.

We leave a silence. I think of the holiday home I stayed in, the yacht we partied on, the elaborate parties, the endless food and drink. I feel sick that it was funded by his crusade to better his own life. Has it been for justice, as he says, or for money?

“So what is she having you do, then?”

I note that he never says Alpha’s name. “I don’t know. She wanted me to come here. She was about to make me speak, but then the Whistleblowers arrived. Thankfully. Didn’t think I’d ever hear myself say that.”