“You know I’m right,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “You’re one of us.”
* * *
After we crossed the border Amanda took the wheel and I checked my phone for voice mail.
There was a single message, from Lisa Wei.
“Trevor is in the hospital,” she said. “Call me as soon as you can.”
* * *
By the time we reached the city limits I had woken Lisa with a callback and managed to get the whole story.
Trev was in a hospital called Sunnybrook, north and east of downtown, and we drove there directly and shared a nervous breakfast in the cafeteria while we waited for visiting hours. Then we made our way to his room.
As early as we were, we weren’t the first to arrive. Damian Levay was already there, standing at Trev’s bedside and saying something quiet and urgent. Trev spotted us and broke into a grin, or what would have been a grin if not for the hardware attached to his face.
Damian Levay was the closest thing our tranche had to a leader, though none of us would have used that word. He was an early adopter, a Tau almost since the first assessments were offered three years ago. He was also lawyer, and in that capacity he had helped Taus all over the city, adjusting his fees to suit his clients’ income. He was full of ideas about the purpose and future of Affinity groups, and Amanda thought he was brilliant. What he had been discussing with Trev was probably the subject of Bobby Botero: it was Botero who had put Trev in the hospital.
Trev’s plan for defending Mouse had been ironclad, except for one thing: it presumed Botero would not continue to harass Mouse if it meant putting himself and his business in mortal danger.
What we had not reckoned on was Botero’s obsessive rage, which was beyond all rational constraint. Botero had no doubt wiped his computer drives, tidied up his financial loose ends, and convinced himself he could talk his way of any trouble with his ’Ndrangheta clients. He had then undertaken a more circumspect surveillance of Lisa and Loretta’s house, and yesterday, after he had seen L & L leave on a shopping expedition and he was sure Mouse was alone, he had come to the door with an aluminum baseball bat in his hand. When Mouse refused to let him in, he shattered a ground-floor window, climbed inside, and began a systematic room-by-room search for her.
Mouse, meanwhile, barricaded herself in her basement room and phoned Trev, who in turn called Dave Santos, the Tau cop who had helped us out in December. Both of them hurried to the house, but Trev was the first to arrive.
Mouse still had her phone, and she told Trev that Bobby was in the basement hammering on the locked door of her room. Trev had no weapon, but he let himself in and hurried down the stairs. In exchange for this act of heroism he took a blow across the face that broke his nose and dislocated his jaw, but he was far enough inside Botero’s swing radius that when he fell he took Botero down with him. Botero was strong, but so was Trev, and the lessons he had learned as a club bouncer served him well even as he was dazed and blinded by the blood flowing into his eyes.
They were still wrestling when Dave Santos crept down the stairs with his handgun drawn. Botero dropped his bat, and at that point it was all over except for the police car that took Bobby away to be booked and the ambulance that carried Trev to the hospital.
Trev’s jaw was supported by a wire brace that made it difficult for him to speak, and the bandages across his face were rusty-brown with blood. His eyes seemed a little vague—he was probably on industrial-strength painkillers—but he was more or less alert. He took a pad and pen from the bedside table and wrote,
THIS WILL ONLY ENHANCE MY RUGGED BEAUTY
—which caused Amanda to laugh and leak a tear.
“We’ve been talking about what happened at the house,” Damian said. “Trev’s going to need to sign a statement. With any luck, Botero is headed to prison for a stretch. The only possible complication is what you guys did—stealing his drives and threatening to expose him. We don’t want that coming out in court. Hopefully, neither Botero nor his lawyer will want to expose his mob connections. So we’re probably okay, but it could have been cleaner.”
We had acted carelessly, in other words, and Trev had paid for it. “I understand,” I said contritely. “What we did about Mouse and Botero—we need to stop doing things like that.”
Damian startled me by laughing.
“Stop it? Fuck no! We have to learn to do it better.”
PART TWO
A Theory of Everyone
In the early decades of this century we saw the world’s financial elites become increasingly divorced from national loyalties. The wealthy learned to think of themselves as essentially stateless—citizens of the Republic of Net Worth—while the rest of us clung to our old-fashioned patriotism. Now the masses (or some fraction of them) have discovered their own post-national system of loyalty. They would rather tithe to their sodalities than pay taxes, and they love their tranchemates just a little bit more than they love their neighbors. If this trend seems harmless, give it time. Politicians should be worried. So should activists. And so should the stateless, wealthy one-percenters, whose continuing influence over the legislative process is no longer assured.
—Mother Jones, online article, “Why the Affinities Matter”
One thing the church has traditionally offered, and secular society has not, is fellowship: a body of shared values and a time and place at which congregants commune for worship. This is not the essence of faith, but it is faith’s essential scaffolding. But the new secular communities—the Affinity groups—are beginning to make inroads into faith’s monopoly on fellowship. Statistics have demonstrated a falling-away from traditional doxastic communities commensurate with the rise of the Affinities. And so we must ask ourselves: Is this a benign social technology, or is it something more sinister—a counter-fellowship, a church stripped of all divinity, a congregation with nothing to worship but itself?
—Christianity Today, online article, “Fellowship Without Faith”
In the debate over whether the Affinities are making people happy, we risk losing sight of the fact that the Affinities are making people money.
—Barrons.com, “The Benefits of Membership”
CHAPTER 6
This happened seven years later, in southern British Columbia, on a two-lane road connecting a resort town called Perry’s Point to the Okanagan Highway. Three of us in a borrowed car, heading for Vancouver. Damian Levay was driving. Amanda sat up front, next to him. I sat in back, watching pine boughs whip past the rain-fogged windows.
Wet blacktop, a winding road, steep grades. Amanda had twice asked Damian to slow down, but he had eased off the accelerator only marginally. He was carrying several gigs of contraband data in his shirt pocket, and he knew there were people who would have liked to relieve him of it. So we came around a curve in fading daylight at an unwise speed, and when the headlights picked out a yellow Toyota parked on the verge Damian swerved to avoid it. It was a fraction of a second later that he saw the woman and the child crossing in front of us.
The rear of the car flailed as he braked, and although he avoided hitting either of them he risked sliding into a skid that would sweep them both down a steep embankment. So he stepped off the brake and twisted the wheel, which sent us hurtling into the forested slope to the left of the road. I caught a freeze-frame glimpse of the woman’s face, inches from the window as we passed: big eyes, pale skin, a cascade of dark, wet hair. Damian braked again and managed to bleed off a little momentum before the car sideswiped a lodgepole pine hard enough to pop the airbags.
The next thing I was aware of was the smell of hot fabric and talcum powder. My face throbbed and my right shoulder felt as if I had tackled a concrete block. I opened my eyes and looked for Amanda.
She was up front, startled but not hurt. She looked to her left and said, “Damian?”
Damian was splayed over the steering wheel. He raised his head when she called his name. There was blood around his nose and mouth. “M’okay,?
?? he said.
Amanda leaned in and switched off the engine. Her door was jammed against the trunk of the tree we had hit. She looked back at me. “Adam, help me get him out.”
I managed to climb out of the car into the drenching rain. I opened the driver’s door, hooked Damian’s left arm over my shoulder, and lifted him out. He found his feet but had to brace himself against the hood. He put his hand to his head and said, “Dizzy.”
Amanda scooted out after him, and since the car seemed in no danger of bursting into flame—the only obvious damage was a trashed side panel—we helped Damian lie down across the backseat.
“He wasn’t driving,” Amanda said tersely.
“What?”
“Listen. We’ll have highway cops here pretty soon. If Damian gets caught up in any kind of litigation, it’ll make us vulnerable. So I’ll clean him up, and when the police or EMS get here I’ll say I was at the wheel. You back me up, okay?”
Damian had the future of the entire Tau Affinity—maybe the future of all the Affinities—in his pocket (literally!), and he’d had a couple of drinks with Meir Klein, which could complicate matters if the cops assayed his blood alcohol. “Okay,” I said. “But I was driving, not you.”
She thought about it a moment and nodded. Amanda had a couple of DUIs on her record from her pre-Tau days. I had a clean record, I hadn’t been drinking, and of the three of us my work was the least critical. “Fine,” she said. “And maybe you should go talk to that woman we almost hit.”
So I walked back to the yellow Toyota. The woman was sitting inside, the door open. She watched as I approached, her skinny arms crossed and her lips pressed tight. The child was in back, a pair of solemn eyes under a drooping orange rain hat. The girl was dressed for the weather, but the mom, if she was the girl’s mom, wore a brown woolen sweater that looked like the hide of a sodden Airedale. I asked if everyone was all right.
She eyed me coolly. “More or less,” she said. “Felt the breeze when you went past. But no damage done.”
“That’s great.”
“I called CAA before you came around the bend. I think my transmission’s fucked up. That’s why we stopped. Been here twenty minutes. You got somebody hurt back there? I already dialed 911.”
“No, we’re okay.”
“You sure? You keep rubbing your shoulder.”
“Sprained it, maybe.” I looked down at her feet. “But you’re bleeding.”
She followed my eyes. Then she hiked up one leg of her jeans, revealing a bloody gash along her calf. “Jesus, I didn’t even feel it. I mean when you went past it felt like the car maybe just brushed my leg, but I guess something caught it…”
Probably the rear bumper. It had lost a lug where it met the wheel well, and the edge stuck out from the frame. “You need to put pressure on that,” I said.
She rummaged in her purse for a pack of Kleenex. I watched her face while she dabbed at the blood. I wanted to judge her sincerity, though it was impossible to read the motives of a non-Tau the way I could read a Tau. Of course, the woman could have been a Tau herself … but my intuition said not.
The injury to her leg wasn’t anywhere near serious, but it might be grounds for an insurance claim if she sensed an opportunity to exact a settlement. “Don’t worry,” she said, apparently reading me more acutely than I was reading her, “it wasn’t your fault. Though you guys took the curve at a pretty good clip.”
“My name’s Adam Fisk.”
“I’m Rachel. Rachel Ragland. In the back, that’s Suze.”
“Hi, Suze.”
Suze was maybe six or seven years old, as blond as her mother was dark. She ducked away from the window, shy but smiling.
Rachel said, “Is your driver really okay?”
I looked back to where Amanda was tending Damian. “Just a bump. But I was the one driving.”
“No you weren’t.”
“Yeah, actually, I was.”
“Uh-huh. So is that what I’m supposed to tell the cops—that you were the one driving?”
“Well, yeah. Because I was.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Okay then,” she said. “That’s what we’ll tell them.”
* * *
Damian’s nose had bled prodigiously—he looked like he was wearing a rust-colored goatee—but he was sitting up by the time I got back to the car. “The EMS guys will probably take me in for observation if they think I have a concussion—”
“They will, and you might.”
“—and I don’t want this stuck in some hospital locker.” He gave Amanda the thumb drive containing Meir Klein’s data, and she tucked it into her purse.
Amanda turned to me. “So what’s the deal with the other vehicle?”
I told her about Rachel Ragland.
“You think she’ll be a problem?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“You think she has an Affinity?”
Sometimes you can tell. Some people liked to advertise their affiliation, and InterAlia had licensed the rights to market lapel pins, tattoos, t-shirts. Rachel displayed none of those obvious signs, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t a Tau, either tested or potential, but beyond that I couldn’t say.
“Worse luck for us,” Amanda said.
“Not necessarily. She seems reasonable. She has a daughter.”
“Proves nothing.”
Amanda distrusted outsiders. And maybe that was wise, given what Meir Klein had told us. Given the future we were facing.
* * *
Klein, of course, was the man who invented the Affinities.
More than a decade ago he had traded a successful academic career in neuroscience and teleodynamics for a contract with InterAlia Inc. At the time InterAlia had been a struggling commercial data-mining business with offices in Camden, New Jersey, using evolutionary algorithms to focus marketing strategies and reclaim “untapped commercial margins” for its corporate clients. Three years after hiring Klein, InterAlia opened its first Affinity-testing centers in Los Angeles, Seattle, Taos, and Manhattan.
The business had taken off slowly, but by the time I took my test the Affinities had become a significant component of InterAlia’s revenue stream; a year after that, Meir Klein’s division dwarfed everything else in InterAlia’s portfolio. And Klein, whose deal with InterAlia had included a generous block of shares in the company’s stock, had become quietly wealthy.
But a little more than a year ago Klein had severed all connections with InterAlia and dropped out of sight. No public explanation was forthcoming, but the Wall Street Journal reported that he had signed a heavily lawyered nondisclosure agreement and promised his former employers to conduct no further research on the human socionome that would compete with their interests. Most of us assumed he had simply retired. Which made it a big surprise when Damian received a hand-delivered invitation to a meeting, signed by Meir Klein himself.
We had been attending the annual All-Affinities North American Potlatch, held this year in Vancouver: more than fifty thousand delegates from tranches across the continent crammed into the city’s convention center and nearby hotels. The note delivered to Damian’s hotel room had been arch and cryptic—It is urgently important that we meet to discuss the future of Tau—but it was on Klein’s letterhead, it included a phone number, and after a quick call Damian was convinced it really was Klein who had sent it.
If Meir Klein wanted to talk to a prominent Tau, it was reasonable that he would have chosen Damian. The Affinities had no official hierarchy, and under the rules laid down by InterAlia all tranches were created equal; the national sodalities existed solely to organize social events and maintain centralized websites and mailing lists. Like every other Affinity, Tau had no president, no board of directors, and no governing body apart from the policy wonks at InterAlia itself. But the Affinities were all about cooperation and organization. And more than any other Tau on the continent, Damian had been a tireless organizer. He had come into the Affinity as a successful b
usiness-affairs lawyer, and he had soon begun setting up financial plans for other Taus: pensions, investment portfolios, trusts. His reputation gradually spread from our tranche to the Toronto Tau network and from there to the entire national sodality, and before long he had hired a small army of accountants and financial experts (all Taus) to handle the huge volume of work. Out of that had emerged TauBourse, the first publicly-traded Affinity-based corporate entity. It was also the first Affinity-based business to face a legal challenge from InterAlia, which had become alarmed at the prospect of others deriving profits, even indirectly, from an institution to which InterAlia owned intellectual property rights.
The litigation was still ongoing. Damian viewed it as a bid by InterAlia for closer control of the Affinities, a prospect that had always worried him, and a few months ago he had started a much less well-publicized project: an effort to systematically debrief Taus about their membership tests, with the goal of reverse-engineering the process. Basically, he wanted to crack the neural and analytical code that identified Taus. Which was an explicit trespass on InterAlia’s intellectual property, which is why we kept it quiet. But given how much we all meant to each other, it was inconceivable that we could leave these tools locked behind a wall of corporate law. The test protocols were the keys to our identity. They were how we had discovered ourselves as a proto-ethnicity. Unless we controlled them, how could we know they wouldn’t be altered or mismanaged?
Klein hadn’t said what he wanted to talk about, but Damian guessed it had something to do with the Tau codes. What was unclear was whether Klein wanted to scold us, warn us, threaten us, or help us.
Some of each, as it turned out.
* * *
The address Klein had given us was a three-story mansion dressed up as a rustic cabin. It was big enough to sleep busloads, but as far as I could tell it was occupied only by Klein and his staff. It was impossible to know how many employees Klein had, but a best guess was “many”—there was the guy who met our car (who looked like an ex-Marine crammed into khakis and a flannel shirt), the guy staking out the entrance hall (likewise), and the woman who offered us canapés on a silver tray after escorting us to a room with a glass wall overlooking the pristine shores of Lake Sanina. No doubt there were others unseen.