“I’m sorry, not tonight.” Roy didn’t want to see Ramya’s wife, didn’t want her to see the claws in his eyes. “Will I be bothered here?”
Roy was worried less about his own safety than about some poor local trying to steal from him or getting in his way. He wasn’t sure how he might react—how Jake might react. The dead man stood beside Roy and looked at the hut with some disgust.
“You don’t need to worry, Mr. Jak-baba,” Ramya said. “The people here are already ruined. There is no need for them to cause you any harm.”
“One thing,” Roy said. “Do you think you could get me some steel wire?”
The little Punjabi’s forehead creased up. “Some wire?”
“To fix the top.” The wooden lattice of the roof looked loose. “In case it rains.”
* * *
Roy waited for Ramya to return with a spool of wire before taking a walk down to the water. He passed a mother wrapped in a gold-and-red sari squatting on a concrete ledge and washing her two gorgeous children in a metal basin under a water spigot. She smiled proudly to Roy.
The sun had set over the city behind him, and a bluish-purple fog filled the eastern sky ahead. He found his way onto a crumbling stone shipway foundation nestled between Indian navy docks to the north and south. A rooster strutted past him, annoyed at having his territory disturbed. Roy sat cross-legged at the end of the pier and watched the luminous haze over the Bay of Bengal slip into darkness.
Was this the land where he had come into this world?
In the semidarkness, he surveyed the water’s edge. Garbage-strewn sand dunes between the ocean and the crumbling seawalls. No one went down there. A good place to bury things, he mused as he fiddled with a length of the wire Ramya had given him.
* * *
Children in matching yellow-and-brown uniforms streamed through the alleys in smiling packs of three and four. It was early morning, and they were on their way out of the slum and off to school.
Roy had spent the night prowling the streets, always moving. In the darkness, he had imagined himself a shark. He read that they could never cease moving forward through the water. If they stopped, oxygen wouldn’t flow over their gills and they would suffocate. If he stopped, he might fall asleep and never wake up—at least, not as himself. The throbbing pain behind in his eyes now radiated into every cubic inch of his skull.
He needed water.
Young women filled clay jugs at the communal water tap. One by one, they balanced their pot or bucket on their heads and walked off. Roy waited. One of the girls had on a red sari. She noticed him looking at her and pulled the covering over her lower face as she knelt to place her jug under the spigot. Roy pushed closer, focused on the red dot on her forehead, and squeezed the spool of wire in his pocket.
She flinched and shied away. Her clay pot rolled onto its side.
“Mr. Jak-baba, Mr. Jak-baba!” Ramya said excitedly. He pulled on Roy’s arm.
Roy blinked and rubbed his eyes. By the time he looked back, the young woman was already hurrying away, water slopping from the clay pot on her head. The other women had moved away from him.
“I have the most wonderful news!” Ramya said, pulling again on Roy’s arm. “Last night I was asking people about the person we are finding.”
He nodded encouragingly at a small figure in front of him. It was a little girl, her dark eyes reflecting light like the water at the bottom of a well. She held a yellow paper in her hand, a photocopy of an elderly woman’s face. There were words in Tamil that Roy didn’t understand, but at the bottom, in English, very clearly: “Mrs. Achari.”
The little girl pointed to an alley and scampered away.
“Today I have just heard of this Mrs. Achari who is trying to save the village,” Ramya explained. “Today posters appeared all over the streets. The girl says she knows the woman.”
Roy was already following the girl.
The edges of the lanes warped and blurred in his vision. Plants in ceramic hanging baskets swayed from second-floor balconies. Brightly dyed clothes fluttered like banners overhead, beckoning him forward. The stink of an open sewer wafted up as they jumped over. Roy lurched ahead, the girl stopping every now and then to smile and urge him forward. The huts and structures gave way to a dusty field at the top of the slum. Before them, a green forest stretched over the hard-packed earth.
“This is the Great Adyar Banyan tree,” Ramya explained. “A very good and holy place.”
“That’s one tree?” The grove extended hundreds of feet to each side.
“Just one tree, but many trunks.”
They reached the edge of canopy. Thick gray-brown trunks rose up, and dozens—hundreds—of branches dug their fingers into the hard-packed earth. The rising sun cast speckled shadows through the green leaves. The roots glowed.
Ramya said, “The Great Banyan is just one tree, but thirty thousand root-trunks go into the ground and back up—over five acres. Four hundred years our great banyan has been here.”
The little girl stopped. Waved again.
Roy wiped stinging dust from his eyes. The roots and branches around him seemed to be conducting signals. Pulsing lights streamed along them. Neurons in a brain, the canopy above them a green skull against the sky. Three men squatted in a circle, deep in conversation. Everything interconnected, and all to the tree.
Straight in front of Roy, the little girl stood beside a woman. She sat at a manual sewing machine, her foot moving the treadle up and down, over and over. The girl tapped her shoulder. The woman stopped and looked up at Roy.
He stared, dumbfounded.
She had on gold-rimmed spectacles, her gray-black hair pulled back under a red lace shawl that covered her body. A streak of white paint ran down her forehead to the bridge of her nose, and a red dot hovered over the middle of her forehead. He took the photo from his pocket and held it out in front of him.
“Ms. Achari?” he said softly.
“Yes?” she replied.
“Adhira Achari?”
“Yes, Adhira Achari is my name.”
“Is this you?”
She lifted gnarled fingers and took the picture from him. Studied it.
Seconds drifted by. Roy leaned forward, and a sweat droplet fell from the tip of his nose and soaked into the earth. He still had a scarf wrapped around his neck. The heat was suffocating.
The woman glanced behind Roy. She handed the picture back with one shaking hand. “This is me. This was me.” She hesitated, then seemed to shrink into her sari. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“You have?”
“You must be my son.”
Roy slumped to the ground.
The branches of the tree shimmered around him as the air left his lungs. Jake Hawkins circled through the pulsing banyan roots at the periphery of his vision. “Can we go now?” the dead man asked. “Are we done here?”
The Achari woman looked scared more than anything else. What was Roy expecting? She had been used and discarded by his family, like an empty milk jug. His fingers dug into an earth that seemed to crater upward around him. The woman looked at Roy and then at Ramya and the little girl, then back at Roy, her eyes darting back and forth.
“What’s wrong?” Roy asked.
She gripped the saffron fabric she was sewing and squeezed until her fist shook.
“Twins,” Jake Hawkins said. “She had twins, didn’t she?”
Why would he say that? “Did you have twins?” Roy whispered to the woman.
She looked terrified, but then, as if seeing there was no escape, she relaxed and nodded.
52
Heaven all benefits. Trust all highoz.
The words floated in space in front of Delta Devlin, came apart into their individual letters, and spun into the maelstrom, sucked into endless white. Royce’s face merged with Jake Hawki
ns’s, their combined being resisting the pull of a white tornado that consumed everything around them. The white bled into red. Angel Rodriguez, Shelby Sheffield, Roy’s mother, Atticus Cargill, Samuel Phipps—they all were pulled up into the churning abyss.
The image of Roy’s father persisted.
He was the first to die, so long ago. The picture of him with his arm around Steve Robinson, the famous tech entrepreneur, now also dead. All circling, all connected in an accelerating orbit.
* * *
Del woke up in a sweat.
Snowflakes whipped past the window of her loft. She swung her legs out of bed and found her fluffy slippers before padding off to the kitchen area to make some coffee. Coffee before anything else. She pulled on a warm cardigan and sat down at her laptop to scan the morning’s news.
The top story was about a Chinese tech company becoming the first to join the five-hundred-billion-dollar club in value, joining the select club of just a few other companies. She poured her coffee and took a sip, her eyes moving on to the next story, about unrest in the Middle East.
She stopped, the coffee cup halfway to her lips. Five-hundred-billion-dollar club. That picture of Roy’s father with his arm around Steve Robinson.
Robinson had taken back the helm of his company, HighSoft, back in 2001, just when the huge tech meltdown began. Steve Robinson and Roy’s father had been good friends. She keyed in some search words. HighSoft was now one of the world’s most valuable companies, producing everything from cell phones to search engines and artificial intelligence.
She searched for and looked at the stock price: $28.25 as of this morning. When Roy’s father died back in 2002, it was just under three dollars. So it had grown almost tenfold in value over twenty years.
Not bad.
Heaven all benefits.
Angel Rodriguez had done enough cloak-and-dagger work to start coding his messages, but he hadn’t thought he was going to get caught with anything. He probably didn’t even think he was in any danger. The man had fought his way out of some of the most dangerous places on the planet. He hadn’t thought there was any risk—but still there would be a reflex.
Heaven all benefits.
This could mean that Eden Corporation was the beneficiary of the trust. She’d had the thought before. Eden. Heaven. It made sense. She had no way to verify it, but it was possible.
Trust all highoz.
Why the “oz” on the end of “high”? It didn’t make any sense. When she met Angel, he had said his motto was “Always follow the money.”
Unless …
Follow the money.
Maybe the “z” was a “2.” Did Angel mean “Trust all HIGH 02”?
Del did a quick calculation. So the ten million dollars of the original trust in 2002, if it was all HighSoft stock, could be worth a hundred million now. That was a huge amount of money to anyone. Atticus Cargill was the manager of the trust. He had to know, despite the confidentiality clauses. But then, how much of that would have made it to today? After all the withdrawals and conversions? A lot would still be left, right?
If this was even true.
So where was Atticus? This was another question. The man had disappeared right after Angel Rodriguez was assaulted right next to Atticus’s office. The old lawyer was a Vietnam War vet. Had he attacked Angel and then disappeared with the money?
Del did another search online, into Eden Corporation. It was registered as a charity organization. You could make donations. Get tax write-offs. Had the lawyer, Atticus Cargill, changed the trust? How could she find out? It was supposed to go to a charity if Roy died—or if he went to jail, and either scenario seemed increasingly likely.
When she spoke to Roy, he had wondered aloud how Eden could afford to pay for his surgery. The cost had to be astronomical. He said the trust had paid for part of it. Or maybe the trust had paid for all of it. Was Eden Corporation profiting from the estates of its patients?
She did another search and found an article crying foul from the estate of Shelby Sheffield. His children, all middle-aged men and women, said that their father had made a massive donation to Eden Corporation in his will, robbing them of tens of millions of dollars and leaving them with nothing. They were going to contest the suicide ruling. The story had been dismissed as sour grapes. His kids were already wealthy.
Was this how Dr. Danesti was funding his company?
How did one check to see who held the stock of a public company? She did another search and found that the major shareholders, any holding more than a few tenths of a percent of the stock, were publicly listed. She scrolled down through the names for HighSoft. The list ended after only about two dozen names. They didn’t list everyone. A dead end. Maybe she could …
A name popped out near the bottom of the list of top institutional holders: RLV Trust Corporation, with 0.54 percent.
She got up so fast, she knocked her coffee over, spilling it all over her kitchen table.
She didn’t stop to mop it up, but ran straight for her stack of file folders, under the new bag of painting supplies she’d bought yesterday. She pulled the files out and spread them on the floor, then pulled one up, ran back to the table, and put it down on the section not covered in coffee. RLV Trust Corporation was Royce Lowell-Vandeweghe Trust Corporation, and 0.54 percent meant it was worth—she almost dropped her calculator—1.64 billion dollars.
Was that possible?
She went back and checked and rechecked the stock price, until it popped out: HighSoft’s stock had split four times since 2002, with one of those a four-to-one split. So it hadn’t grown by ten times. The stock had grown to more than three hundred times its original value when it was placed in the trust. It was right there, out in the open, at the bottom of a public ledger.
Royce’s trust was worth close to two billion dollars.
Had Roy’s family made a deal with Dr. Danesti, for him to save Roy’s life in exchange for becoming the beneficiary of the trust? Two billion dollars was enough to make people do a lot of things. Was it possible Roy’s mother agreed to this, or his wife, Penny—or Atticus? Where had the old lawyer disappeared to?
And where was Roy?
In three days, the trust would liquidate. Nearly two billion dollars of HighSoft stock would convert to cash. The money would go either to Roy or, if he should be dead or in jail, to the charity named in the trust. But where was he? What if none of those outcomes became possible to determine? All that cash would be stuck in legal limbo for years. Two billion dollars …
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
53
“Twins—now, there’s a twist,” Jake Hawkins said.
The dead man’s face floated over the computer screen.
Roy sat in a small internet café at the edge of the slum, a single fan blowing a merciful stream of cooling air at his face and sweat-drenched body. After talking to the Achari woman—his birth mother, was it possible?—he had wandered back to check the latest news, promising to return to see her. His last-ditch effort to close the final loop before he killed himself, to know the truth. But the truth had opened a whole new Pandora’s box.
He had a twin.
Roy was born in a test tube, his head later cut off and attached to someone else’s body. He felt ill but couldn’t throw up, was suffocating but wouldn’t die. The needling headache had transformed into rhythmic tremors throughout his whole head. He could barely focus enough to read the letters on the computer screen before him.
The practice was common, he had learned. Ramya had explained it on their walk back. It wasn’t unusual for surrogate mothers to have twins—a result of the combination of fertility drugs and hormones, and the process of egg harvesting and implantation into the uterus. All designed to maximize the odds of a successful pregnancy, but also upping the odds for twins.
The problem was that the rich familie
s subsidizing the process might not want twins, and this risked an unhappy customer, so sometimes the managers would hide the twin birth. They would proudly deliver a son or daughter to the family and keep the unwanted child for another customer, another adoption.
Roy clicked through web pages detailing the practice. It was an easy though illegal way to make extra money, and who needed it more than these people?
And here I was, thinking I was your twin. Jake’s face wobbled in the air.
“Shut up,” Roy said. “Just shut up!”
With one shaking hand, he got out two amphetamine pills and dry-swallowed them.
He did a web search for Hope Hawkins. A new article appeared, in which she was telling reporters that her husband was murdered, that he wasn’t the Fire Island Killer. He had trouble clicking the buttons, could barely focus on the images and words on the screen. Everything seemed to vibrate: the walls, the floors. Everything shook and trembled.
Roy sat upright. Had his father known about his twin?
He had asked the Achari woman, and she said she had met his father. She said they were about to tear down the slum, that she’d begged him for help. Roy asked questions about the doctor who had delivered him. Who was it? She said it was a Russian man, that it was an experimental program back then. He felt as if his brain were stuck in tar, hot and slow and frying in the heat.
“Let’s just go to the clinic,” Jake said. The dead man took an empty seat beside Roy. “We have something else to investigate. We can’t stop now. Do you think your mother knew about this?”
“She couldn’t have known.”
“Maybe Virginia was the one who told him to throw your twin away with the rest of the garbage. Sound like her? Ever think about that? Maybe that’s why your father cut her out of the will.”
“Quiet, please.” Roy rubbed his eyes and tried to clear them.
Everything was blurry, the room floating in and out of focus. He felt to make sure the switchblade was still in his pocket. If he felt that particular feeling of blacking out, he knew what to do.
The Dreaming Tree Page 29