The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [55]
He phoned his wife, waking her, and said good night. He envied her.
Steve Rhodes had been twenty-five years old when his father told him the universe wasn’t anything like he thought. Far more was known about its mechanisms than Steve’s Yale professors even knew. And yet there were also mysteries that went deeper than anyone imagined. His father, his father’s father, his father’s father’s father had all been keepers of these ancient confidences.
Their biggest secret of all was how and when the world would end.
It would end when everyone in the world knew the last of their secrets.
Steve realized soon after his ceremonial indoctrination that there were great benefits to being caretakers of such valuable knowledge. Steve began to suspect the real purpose of the Thousand—or at least the mathematici faction, to which his family belonged—was not to save the world from itself, but to profit from the gap between what they knew and what everyone else knew.
For a time he had believed they were the good guys. Soon he realized there were no good guys, just bad guys and worse guys. There was his father’s mathematici, who would kill for the right to use the knowledge, and the Sheik’s acusmatici, who would kill to keep it under wraps. The moral difference between them wasn’t clear to Stephen.
His parents encouraged him to marry another mathematici, as they each had, keeping the secrets and allegiances within families. Every time he saw a familiar name of someone engaged to a distant cousin on The New York Times wedding pages, he could feel his parents smiling. Rhodes, though, had no plans to pass his burden on to his own son.
It was the plane crashes—the appalling murders of 374 people—that finally turned him. The Sheik had been calling him for months, ever since the mathematici had declared their intentions to go ahead with “the Beijing Development,” as the Sheik called it. “The acusmatici need your vote in Boca,” the Sheik said. “A vote to stop the mathematici from risking not just what we have but everything.” Could Rhodes imagine what would happen if the knowledge and power entrusted to them were leaked to the outside?
The Sheik had told him, “The act of self-destruction, murder and suicide, is accounted for in God’s human equation. It is written in the same hand both in our DNA and in the laws of probability.”
Rhodes had voted with the rest of the mathematici in Boca Raton, but the Sheik’s words were in his head when he saw the helicopter shots of the Florida accident site on the news. What if everyone knew how to crash a plane with a calculator? Two acusmatici and one mathematici—the last a traitor who had voted against the Beijing Development—were dead in the wreckage. The mathematici had the votes to proceed, but their actions had turned Steve Rhodes into a double agent, his sympathies having secretly shifted from mathematici to acusmatici.
Yet since he’d thrown in his lot with the Sheik and his allies, the acusmatici had done nothing but ask him to commit one horrible act after another. The expertise to carry out the Beijing Development was supposed to have died with Marlena Falcone. But now the Sheik suspected the mathematici had found another way, and now more people would have to die. He wondered, Am I a better man as a spectator to one side’s atrocities, or as a participant to the other side’s crimes? Now he was stuck, an adherent to a religion he didn’t believe in.
The Sheik was a pious man. He believed the Thousand were keepers of the word of God, passed to them by the prophet Pythagoras, a testament that preceded the Gospels and the Koran by centuries, a glorious, if incomplete, peek at creation’s divine order. Most of Rhodes’s colleagues among the mathematici, on the other hand, thought the testament was simply a scientific revelation from a brilliant man, millennia ahead of his time. There might or might not be a God, but what Pythagoras had discovered and passed along to his disciples were