Fragment

SEPTEMBER 4

Midnight

Thatcher Redmond found the button on his armrest and pinged the stewardess.

He smiled craggily when the young Asian woman appeared. “May I have a few bags of peanuts? Not the warm nuts, but the bags?” he asked her.

“Surely. Let me get some for you, sir.”

Although she was pretty, Thatcher turned away in irritation. This whole last-minute trip to Phoenix had filled him with a grating sense of panic. And now, with his mission accomplished, just when he thought he could finally put it all behind him, they had been sitting on the tarmac for six unbearable hours as some Keystone Kops series of fuckups kept them stranded at the airport. He didn’t like the idea of being recognized. And guessing at the reason for the delay was toying with his sanity.

His hair flowed down in distinctive muttonchops that curved up to join a thick mustache. This red W of facial hair was Thatcher Redmond’s tonsorial signature. As a celebrity professor and a public intellectual, his image was his autograph, as his agent often repeated. As a result, he could not change his look any more than he could change his name. Sometimes, lately, he had caught himself feeling a twinge of envy for his peers, who still possessed all the little freedoms of their anonymity, such as shaving their facial hair. Sometimes, but not very often…

At least he had been able to upgrade to business class on the return flight. On the flight to Phoenix earlier this afternoon, he’d been wedged between two large identical twins, who snored. They had bought window and aisle seats intentionally. Before they had fallen asleep the twins had told him they were embarking on a southwestern vacation that was to culminate in Las Vegas, Nevada, and it had irritated him to know that.

Thatcher was an accomplished gambler. Despite the fact that he was currently $327,000 in debt, the result of an improbable series of setbacks, he was convinced that he had a mathematical aptitude that verged on genius. Thatcher could almost see probabilities like a slot-machine display in his mind.

Whether or not this intuition was right more than fifty percent of the time, it had paid off enough times to seem like it was, and it had brought just enough windfalls to make betting on his intuition a secret way of life. Only recently had it become a fullblown crisis, just when his divorce from his third wife was reaching the ugly stage.

And in the middle of all of that, out of the blue, his teaching assistant from three years earlier had threatened him with a paternity suit. The harpy was actually claiming to have had his son, who was apparently now two-and-a-half years old, and she wanted to discuss marriage or a “suitable settlement” with him to provide for their love-child.

It was not a threat so much as blackmail, served warm and lovingly. In her phone call to him, Sedona had explained that she had seen him on television since his book’s astonishing rise to best-sellerdom and his subsequent ascension as the media’s favorite intellectual. In a single breath, she had complimented him on his success and attached his financial obligation to her progeny like a tick on his back.

For years, Thatcher had managed to keep his gambling strictly private and separate from his career as a professor of zoology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had gone for broke on his latest gamble, however, and had shattered all his own rules. It was a professional wager that was quite public, unlike his others, and though it had been the safest bet he had ever placed, it had paid off bigger than any other.

At the age of fifty-nine, Thatcher Redmond’s career had hit the jackpot with the recent publication of his book The Human Factor, which had won two prestigious awards, including, just twelve days ago, the coveted Tetteridge Award for Popular Science Writing.

With any luck, he would bag another trophy, the prestigious half-a-million-dollar MacArthur Genius grant, which would be announced in a few weeks. Though nominations were supposed to be confidential, he knew that his name had been dropped into the hat.

There might even be a Pulitzer in the works after that, if the MacArthur grant materialized. Thatcher was on a roll.

After years of publishing dry, unsensational papers on genetic correlations between fruit flies and related fauna, works that would never be read by anyone other than a dozen colleagues and a few hundred of his put-upon students, Thatcher had gambled that nothing would pay more richly than playing the part all non-scientists wanted scientists to play. Sincerity, or even knowledge, need not even enter into it.

Indeed, Thatcher suspected even the most sincere scientists who had been playing this game longer than he had done so with at least a little cynical self-interest, considering how rich was the prize and how easily it was obtained.

The sea of grant money, honorariums, awards, book deals, and royalties-not to mention popularity, fame, and career opportunities-was deep, warm, and inviting for the scientist willing to provide his expert opinion, especially to the government or media, and thus lend scientific backing to the cause du jour. The water was fine, and it welcomed the sincere and the insincere, the idealist and the opportunist alike. Thatcher’s only regret was that he hadn’t dived in sooner.

Since his late bloom of fame, the zoologist had found himself eagerly sought out for commentary on an astonishing range of issues and causes, and he had been enjoying the ride thoroughly. As long as he echoed the most fashionable trends in science, there was no end to the requests for appearances and sound bites.

Thatcher knew that at this moment in human history it was fashionable to decry the impact of human beings on the environment, and so he had set out to write a book that would cash in on the current trend by going so far out on that trajectory that everyone else on the catwalk would look frumpy and outmoded. And his strategy had succeeded-brilliantly.

Knowing he was exploiting a niche many of his colleagues had already colonized ahead of him, Thatcher had decided to invade at the top of the food chain. Bypassing academia, he’d gone straight for the minds of the non-scientific public. It didn’t take a biology degree to discover where the mother’s milk of his profession came from. His run might not last long, but it didn’t have to. He would get in, grab what he wanted, and get out in time to retire very comfortably in Costa Rica. He already knew the house he wanted to buy. It helped that he did not care if in the process he damaged academia or even the cause of environmentalism. In fact, after years of toiling fruitlessly in the vineyard with little or no recognition or appreciation, he got a positive thrill out of calculating that probability.

His book was bringing in the kind of royalties and speaking fees he needed to fend off his bookies and his latest spouse. Against all odds, Thatcher Redmond had proven fit enough to survive, after all.

And then this Sedona business came along, and fucked everything.

The Airbus A321 finally taxied down the runway and throttled up, surging down the tarmac. A delirious cheer filled the plane and a wave of relief surged in his chest as it lifted off the runway.

He replayed the day’s events in his mind one more time. Seven hours ago he had sat in the back of a taxi heading for the uppercrust Camelback Mountain section of Phoenix. The exaggerated rock formations outside the window had reminded him of The Flintstones. Even though she was living in a mansion on a mesa in the wealthiest suburb of the city, owing to her well-to-do family and friends, the harpy had made him go there to hit him up for a child he had never wanted or even knew he had.

“Wait here, Thatcher,” Sedona had said to him, he recalled now.

“Here” happened to be an airy, sun-drenched family room decorated with expensive dolphin art in the mansion she was house-sitting for a friend. It had a high, open-beam ceiling and a sliding glass door looking out over the pool. The door stood open a crack to a dry Phoenix breeze.

Sedona warned that Junior had a tendency to jump in the pool outside if nobody stopped him.

The redheaded brat ran around screaming and crashing into things the entire time.

She had told him the little monster never remembered to use his sea-serpent life preserver, that he always ran straight for the pool and jumped right in.

But that sliding glass door was open a crack…

“I’m waiting for the cat to come in. Don’t worry, the baby can’t fit through that,” Sedona had told Thatcher. “He’s not strong enough yet to push the door open by himself and get out.”

Then she left to answer the front door, some sort of delivery…

Was it a setup? There were practically neon signs around it. He’d looked around for a hidden camera as the probabilities whirred like slots wheels in his mind.

He rubbed the edge of his rubber shoe now as he leaned back in the comfortable airline seat. After the miserable outbound trip, he had opted for a later flight in exchange for an upgrade to Business Class. His prize had been a six-hour wait, but almost an entire section all to himself.

As his cab waited for him fifteen minutes later, he had spoken to Sedona on the front doorstep, reassuring her that he would help her. He promised her that he would be in contact with her soon. He even kissed her on the cheek as the smoke-gray cat had run out the front door and curled around his leg, nearly tripping him as he walked to his taxi.

When the cab passed an ambulance a couple miles away, speeding in the opposite direction, his heart had pounded.

With the siren blaring and the lights flashing on top, it looked like a million-dollar slot machine paying off, Thatcher had thought.

“Hey, aren’t you Thatcher Redmond?” came a loud voice.

He turned, startled, to the man across the aisle. “Yes.”

“Well! I read your book, mate!” The sunburned Australian shook his hand vigorously. “You really figure human beings are going to wipe everything off the planet, eh?”

My dear rube, Thatcher mused, you just increased that very probability in my mind. “It’s a distinct possibility.” Thatcher smiled graciously.

“I don’t know.” The man shook his head. “I travel a lot, and I look out this window and I can hardly tell we’re even here, eh?”

“Can you see a deadly virus inside a human being?”

“Well, no, now that you mention it.”

“Free will is a virus. All that is necessary to create destruction is to set it loose and power it with reason. You can bet on it every time.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Not too good. Ah, well…”

“Don’t worry. The shit probably won’t hit the fan for a couple of centuries. We’re safe.” Thatcher winked obscenely at the man and grinned.

“Ah, that’s good for us, then! Too bad for our kids, though, I reckon. Oh, sorry to bother. I can see you have things on your mind.”

“Not at all,” Thatcher said, relieved to end the conversation.

“Here are your peanuts, sir.”

Thatcher flinched as the flight attendant at his elbow surprised him.

“Thank you!” he snapped, irritated that he had been identified by a witness on this plane and trying to calculate the damage.

Thatcher clicked off the overhead light and looked into the black window as he leaned his chair back. He tried to focus on the appearance he was scheduled to make tomorrow night on CNN to discuss the subject of Henders Island, again. But his thoughts drifted as he watched his reflection in the darkened pane. It won’t matter, he thought. Of course I visited her. No one can prove a thing.

He snatched a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing steward.

Finally allowing himself to relax, he toasted himself. And felt the same welling thrill in his stomach that he felt whenever he struck the jackpot.