WILLIAM FRUEHOFF, TASKED WITH FINDING the greatest man on the face of the Earth, had run out of options. There was no Buford. Fruehoff’s intention was to leave the country, live under a series of false identities—all independently and untraceably wealthy—and be dead within five to ten years satisfied he’d flung enough sin and debauchery in the face of mortality to sing his song as death approached.
This intention found favor because: (1) the odds of finding Buford were dead set against him; (2) the Nonrich Corp. was moving massive amounts of capital in what ultimately would amount to global tectonic shift, and whatever piece of the world broke off he wanted to be far, far from; lastly, one of the cleaning crew was about to be deported and she gave the most magnificent, languorous fellatio ever captured in sonnets and whom, as a miniscule token of defiance, he’d decided to take with him.
The reality was there was no way in hell he could accomplish this. One didn’t get to be this high in Buford’s world to disappear. Only Buford could do that.
The great, soul-crushing question was: Why had he done it on his watch!
No demands, no sightings, no communiqués—nothing gleaned from torturing Thoom, Vampire or Djinn.
The penalty for this kind of failure wasn’t death, it was being thrown into the field. “Exercise” Buford euphemistically termed it. “Best thing to recover the soul.” This meant being sent to the location of one’s last failure with the mortal directive of straightening it out.
William Fruehoff checked his suitcase one last time. He’d never had any intention of going to Atlantis. Its existence had always seemed like a remora to him, hanging parasitically off the Earth—the true world—while contributing absolutely nothing. But here he was, packing for Atlantis, and missing the blue jacket with the micro-ablative armor sewn inside.
He walked the length of a cobalt blue runner to the second room of his closet, vaguely perturbed by something. When he exited the closet he looked down. The runner had eyes.
The instant he jumped he realized there was no danger because he recognized those eyes.
*checking in on the score* it said in a nearly southern drawl close to Fruehoff’s own, the sound issuing from some indeterminate point in the air.
He had dreamed about those eyes a hundred times. They were the eyes of God. Actually, it was Leviathan, but he didn’t know that. Worldwide, people sensitive to the transmission freaked out, hallucinating eyes appearing in random places, and the planet would mark another day of worldwide migraines with panicked scrambling by the Center for Disease Control.
The hallucination passed. The cobalt runner was nowhere near plush enough to contain another living being. It lay unmoving and ready for bare feet.
‘Visions are never random,’ Buford had written. They were, but if you’d told people the image of Elvis Christo was really just a few neurons firing disparate impressions at one another, you’d never see a profit margin in any industry above half a percent.
The eyes of God. Add to that a sudden headache to prove it wasn’t simply imagination. And the timing of it, as he rumbled over having to go to Atlantis in search of the False Prophet Buford—that could only be necessary and important. ‘Checking in on the score.’ Who, the universe apparently wanted to know, was winning?
Was he aware he was on a team? Fruehoff asked himself. Yes. Did he believe in taking one for the team? No. But he did believe in tilting the playing field to his advantage.
Right now that meant summoning Aileen Stone’s assassins.
~~~
Aileen Stone wasn’t in the habit of loaning out her bodyguards. “You want them to go to Atlantis with you?”
“Yes.”
“Why should I release them to you?”
“Whatever happened with Buford is more than I can handle, right? I’m going to need a team.”
“You’ll have infantry.”
“I need perfection.”
Aileen Stone weighed this. She also thought of slapping him again. “How long have you known who they were?”
“I really don’t think there are any secrets left in the world,” said Fruehoff. “I could tell you God told me and that’d be as reasonable as anything else. Aileen, three people in the world see you on a regular basis. I think you can do without your bodyguards a few days.”
Aileen played with an earring thoughtfully. “A few days. You think that’s all it’s going to take to resolve a global catastrophe? A few days.”
“A few days ago we ruled the world. Now we’re checking the scoreboard.”
“If nothing changes in a few days?”
“Then obviously I won’t be coming back.”
She could live with that. She contacted them. On the video phone they neither endorsed nor disagreed. They simply adopted the steely persona she thought was their norm and acknowledged her request.
Nor did they care that Fruehoff was naked in her office except for a tie loosely wrapped around his penis. They’d seen a lot worse on video phones.
She signed off, dropped the phone, and looked down at Fruehoff. “Once more,” she said, totally unsatisfied from twenty minutes before. “And this time with feeling.”