Freedom [152]
Based on the intelligence Lalitha gathered in her return to Forster Hollow, Walter and Vin Haven had crafted a new and outrageously expensive offer for its inhabitants. Simply offering them more cash, Lalitha said, wasn’t going to do the trick. For Mathis to save face, he needed to be the Moses who led his people to a new promised land. Unfortunately, as far as Walter could tell, the people of Forster Hollow had negligible skills beyond hunting, engine repair, vegetable growing, herb gathering, and welfare-check cashing. Vin Haven nevertheless obligingly made inquiries within his wide circle of business friends and returned to Walter with one interesting possibility: body armor.
Until he’d flown to Houston and met Haven, in the summer of 2001, Walter had been unfamiliar with the concept of good Texans, the national news being so dominated by bad ones. Haven owned a large ranch in the Hill Country and an even larger one south of Corpus Christi, both of them lovingly managed to provide habitat for game birds. Haven was the Texan sort of nature lover who happily blasted cinnamon teal out of the sky but also spent hours raptly monitoring, via closed-circuit spycam, the development of baby barn owls in a nest box on his property, and could expertly rhapsodize about the scaling patterns on a winter-plumage Baird’s sandpiper. He was a short, gruff, bullet-headed man, and Walter had liked him from the first minute of his initial interview. “A hundred-million-dollar ante for one passerine species,” Walter had said. “That’s an interesting allocation.”
Haven had tilted his bullet head to one side. “You got a problem with it?”
“Not necessarily. But given that the bird’s not even federally listed yet, I’m curious what your thinking is.”
“My thinking is, it’s my hundred million, I can spend it whatever way I like.”
“Good point.”
“The best science we got on the cerulean warbler shows populations declining at three percent a year for the last forty years. Just because it hasn’t passed the threshold of federally threatened, you can still plot that line straight down toward zero. That’s where it’s going: to zero.”
“Right. And yet—”
“And yet there’s other species even closer to zero. I know that. And I hope to God somebody else is worrying about ’em. I often ask myself, would I slit my own throat if I was guaranteed I could save one species by slitting it? We all know one human life is worth more than one bird’s life. But is my miserable little life worth a whole species?”
“Thankfully not a choice that anybody’s being asked to make.”
“In a sense, that’s right,” Haven said. “But in a bigger sense, it’s a choice that everybody’s making. I got a call from the director of National Audubon back in February, right after the inauguration. The man’s named Martin Jay, if that ain’t the damndest thing. Talk about the right name for the job. Martin Jay is wondering if I might arrange him a little meeting with Karl Rove at the White House. He says one hour is all he needs to persuade Karl Rove that making conservation a priority is a political winner for the new administration. So I say to him, I think I can get you an hour with Rove, but here’s what you got to do for me first. You got to get a reputable independent pollster to do a survey of how important a priority the environment is for swing voters. If you can show Karl Rove some good-looking numbers, he’s gonna be all ears. And Martin Jay falls all over himself saying thank you, thank you, fabuloso,