How many times had the Center for Progress and Peace tried to take Father down in the past? Are they the real reason Father insisted that the SynTech engineers build him a literal arsenal he could carry in his head and advanced systems for detecting threats?
Wait. Is SynTech paying into this fund to make sure that no one gets to make any world-changing new technology but us? I make a note to check on that later, as well as to see if Father’s intel resources already include anything on the illuminati now that we know it’s real name.
“This was not the reason that I call you today,” Antonio goes on. “But I think you need to know it so that what I do want to tell you makes sense. Let me go on. So I tell the Senhor Wu no, and he doesn’t bother me again for some years. I go about my business with that woman. I spend a lot of money, we make the system with the little robots, we find the people to work with the little headsets, we go to Hawaii, we have a nice time, la la la. We meet you wonderful young people. You know all this. Then she and I have to go our different ways, with thanks to you. Then, just a few weeks after that, I find that someone is trying to kill me.”
He holds up his hands again as if in complete surprise. According to my index, this wouldn’t have been anything new. He made quite a few enemies in his younger years before he decided that philanthropy and leadership made a better legacy for him than the brutal acquisition of enormous wealth.
“And it was not just one someone trying to kill me, which I suppose does happen to anyone from time to time, but many someones. Of course, I could not have this. After the second attempt, my security team caught the fellow, but before we could have a nice conversation about why he would want to do such a terrible thing, the gentleman’s head just, eh, explode.” His fingers lift up in front of his face, then flick outwards. “Nothing left. But we did some of the DNA test and all of that and that let us find his mother, and that let us find the money he had been paid, and my accountants did some very clever things which finally let us find out that it was, are you ready to be surprised? This Center for Progress and Peace that had paid him. Which of course made me very, very curious about them.”
“I can imagine.”
“So, I put my best men on it. I find the office that seems to be the home for them. I tell you now, it is not the place that they put on their website. I put some other men to try to get jobs at the Center. To go under the covers. It does not work. They are very, very picky. I do the watching of the phone calls, of the emails, of the garbage that goes out from the office and from the homes of the people that work there. I even find some pretty young ladies to see if any of these fellows might talk in their sleep. I find nothing. All neat and clean. As if they never did the many things that I knew that they did.”
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“Like they had a lot experience at covering their tracks?”
“Exactly that! Exactly! My men had never seen anyone so good at making it seem they had done nothing. But then, we had a bit of luck. One of the men from the Center, one of the very important ones, needed a little bit of surgery. Nothing so big, one of those that older gentlemen have when they check for cancer in the… what is the polite way to say it? In the back of the side?”
From Evan: Colonoscopy.
“A colonoscopy?” I parrot.
“Ah, yes, that is the one. And we, being the well prepared boys and girls that we were, we found that an appropriate donation to the proper medical professionals let us not only remove a very ugly little device implanted into the base of his neck, but also we were able to invite him to live at my house near Brasilia as my guest.”
An image of Antonio’s Brasilia home flashes across my overlay. It’s more of a walled military compound than a standard house, and I don’t doubt for an instant that it has some very appropriate rooms in the basement for holding an unwilling guest or two.
“What luck that you were able to extend that invitation. And I take it that some of what your guest had to say involved us?”
“Oh! Oh! Yes it did! Which is, I suppose you have now guessed, the reason that I have called you today. He had a very great deal to say about you and your Butler Institute. Especially, he had many things to say about your brother, the one that took that little knife to his own father.”
“Jeff.”
“That is the one.”
“And?”
He crosses his arms and grins the smile of a cat who just cornered a mouse. “Now, my young American friend, it seems that I have something you very much would like. Just as a year ago, you had something that I very much would have liked.”
I suppress a groan. The information Antonio has is certainly priceless to us, and he knows it. The Institute’s finances start flowing through the confluence of my electronic and organic minds. We’re only a couple of months out from emptying our bank accounts, having to sell off SynTech stock, losing control of the company, and ruining Father’s whole plan. Whatever he wants, I hope we can do it without offering any cash in the short term.
“Alright, Antonio. Let’s talk terms.”