Randy in the grip of revelation. As he spills what he knows about D. J. Michael to this self-righteous bitch, a new light dawns across the landscape of his mind, and an excitement builds in him that he conceals from her.
His revelation is that the confederacy of elites behind this conspiracy will fail, will be exposed and either brought to justice or slaughtered by outraged and terrified mobs who will revolt with such fury that the savage and bloody French Revolution will seem to be a genteel transition of power.
To this point, Randy has been an ardent believer in the plans of these people who call themselves Techno Arcadians, who intend to create a world of plenty and total peace through the application of total control. But he is no longer one of them. For now he sees. He sees.
He sees that Techno Arcadia will never be built, that everyone from D. J. Michael to the lowest minion involved in the scheme will face ruin and death—everyone but him. Randall Larkin will skate and live and prosper because in one morning he has been cast down from on high by, of all people, this hot-looking slut who ought to be sitting in a suite in Aspasia, waiting for the next visitor to show her what total submission means. Therefore, he has been awakened from his delusions in time to survive what fate awaits the other Techno Arcadians.
He is not nearly as rich as D.J., but he is smarter than the billionaire, smarter than any Arcadian he’s met, smarter than these smartest-of-all people. So if he could be reduced to this, so will they be, because smart isn’t enough. You’ve got to have luck, too. Luck doesn’t favor the smart. It doesn’t favor anyone. Luck can overturn the most clever plans of the smartest people. If this half-smart piece of tail, Jane Hawk, can take down the likes of Randall Walker Larkin, it is sheerest folly to suppose that total peace through total control will in fact come to pass.
He has twenty million in a super-secret account on Grand Cayman Island and the means to hire a private jet to get him to those warm climes tomorrow. On another Caribbean island, he has an estate owned by a trust that cannot be traced to him.
Not least of all, he has twelve of the new generation of nanomachine control mechanisms in a secure cold-storage facility. When D.J. is brought down hard and the conspiracy implodes, when all of the others are either in prison or dead, Randall Larkin, under the name Ormond Heimdall, can guarantee himself a life surrounded by the most loyal and submissive servants and bodyguards.
From black despair he rises now to the hope of resurrection, and he sells out D.J. to the furthest extent of which he is able.
The half-smart rat-queen bitch with her pen and notebook jots down what seems important, and before Randy finishes, he reveals one more place where D.J. sometimes goes to ground. He tells her half the truth of Iron Furnace, enough to entice her, leaving out one crucial detail. That one thing she doesn’t know might be the death of her. Although she has saved Randy by opening his eyes to the role that luck will surely play in the downfall of the Techno Arcadians, he wants her to suffer and die because, after all, she has robbed him of his dream of a world of peace, and a man’s dreams are sacred to him.