The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [134]
The owner of the pencil-thin yellow plane was mostly silent for the trip, but his friend, whom the others called “Sheik” with a mixture of respect and playfulness, had been on the aircraft on many occasions and he passed the time dictating its specifications in Arabic. African waterfall bubinga wood appointments and gold-plated fixtures. A state-of-the-art cockpit with a dozen LCD touch screens tracking not just the plane’s vital signs but the weather and air traffic and sports scores, as well. Rolls-Royce engines. Five redundant generators in the extremely unlikely event four of them broke down in flight (“There are some things even Stephen Rhodes doesn’t gamble with,” he said).
The Sheik had been doing a lot of dictating, in fact. He had dictated that this meeting be conducted on the plane, to shield it from possible eavesdropping. He had dictated that it was too risky for Rhodes, who hadn’t been invited, to attend the gathering of mathematici in Chicago, that the mission could be accomplished alone by his emissary, a young man who had proven himself worthy and who had clearly earned the Sheik’s respect. Rhodes was uncertain if he had yet earned that respect, as well.
The four individuals—three men and one woman—whom the Sheik had invited were familiar to Rhodes, but he had never been friendly with them. Until recently, they had been his rivals, adversaries among brothers. They were acusmatici. And although it was difficult for him even to think it, Rhodes presumed he must be acusmatici as well by now.
When they boarded the plane, the pilot, a man who, like most of Stephen’s close assistants, served out of some combination of loyalty, fear, and greed, had gone over his usual preflight checklist, and when he got to the part where he asked everyone to shut off their cell phones and electronic devices, the acusmatici laughed heartily and nodded at one another and double-checked their phones and laptops and digital assistants and anything with a battery, really, because they were aware of recent history and they knew the ways of the mathematici well, although not as well as Rhodes did, and Rhodes responded that he didn’t find any of it funny. They rolled their eyes, and that was about the time Rhodes stopped talking and the Sheik started dictating.
After a while, Rhodes retreated to the rear section of the plane, where the emissary sat straight upright in a leather captain’s chair, alone with a book and a soft drink. He was a legacy, his father one of Stephen’s longtime mathematici friends, which is how the emissary had come to work for Rhodes. He had a bit of a rebellious streak in him, however, and the Sheik and Rhodes had given him several tests of his allegiance and he had passed them with ease—with disturbing ease, Rhodes thought to himself, marveling at the extraordinary lengths to which a son will go just to piss off his father.
“We’ll be landing soon at O’Hare.”
The emissary nodded.
“The single most authoritative daytime sighting in history happened there. Do you know about it?” The emissary indicated that he did, but closed his book to listen nevertheless. “November seventh, 2006, at four-thirty p.m. More than a dozen people—ramp workers, maintenance crew, pilots even—all observed a metallic disk between two and eight meters wide hovering about fifteen hundred feet in the sky over gate C-seventeen at O’Hare Airport. After a few minutes, it accelerated straight upward, punching a distinct hole of blue sky into the low ceiling of clouds.”
Rhodes continued, “A pilot allegedly opened the windscreen of his plane and took a digital photo, which has been suppressed by the airline. The FAA denied