Flawed (Flawed, #1)(85)

The door closes behind her, and I’m left in the room alone.





FIFTY-NINE

I BEGIN BY looking at the photographs. The same man is in all of them with different people. All formal business photographs of handshakes. Alpha is in some, standing alongside him, and I don’t know who any of the people in the photographs are. I see Alpha and this man in a frame on the desk, and I guess it’s her husband. I don’t know anybody else, but then the more I study the people in the photos, the more I recognize them as being with world leaders. Important men and women whom I see on the news on the rare times I watch the news. And I do recognize one man: Judge Crevan.

Alpha, her husband, Judge Crevan, and his wife. At a garden party, the ladies in summer floral dresses, all with a glass of champagne in their hands, all four of them looking like they’re in the middle of a big laugh, as though somebody had just said something funny. The best of friends. Again, I question Alpha’s motivations. Have I allowed her to sweep me away from the Whistleblowers, thinking she was helping me, and am now a sitting duck?

Another wall reveals a series of framed qualifications and accolades for a Professor Lambert. I hear a cough behind me and I turn around. Expecting to see a Whistleblower, instead I find a man in a crumpled shirt and jeans standing at yet another door that appeared from nowhere.

“Yes, yes, another secret door. She’s got quite the little rat maze going on down here.” He chuckles. “Bill,” he says, holding out his hand.

He wavers a little as he does this, loses his balance.

As I step closer, I can smell alcohol on his breath. He has gray stubble on his face and looks as though he’s gone a few days sleeping in the same clothes.

“You’re Alpha’s husband,” I say, recognizing him from the photographs.

He chuckles again. “Do you know, there was once a time when she was my wife? Anyway. There was once a time when lots of things were a lot of things. So you’re the one. The One.” He widens his eyes in mock-worship. “She’s been talking about you a great deal.” He studies me and then goes around to his desk and searches through the drawers. It takes him some time, enough for me to study him and the room he has come from. It looks like a kitchen, which no doubt has another door into another room. Why would they have another home buried beneath? In the last drawer he checks, I hear the clink of bottles.

He looks at me in mock-surprise. “Fancy that. Want a drink?”

“We’re not allowed to drink,” I say firmly, noting the branding on his temple.

“Ah, yes.” He chuckles again, and then he whispers, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“The Whistleblowers are upstairs,” I say, astonished by his behavior.

“Oh, yes, the scary whistlers.” He whistles, imitating their sound, and chuckles. “I’m not afraid of them. Are you?” He pours the whiskey into a glass tumbler on a silver tray by the desk and sits down in the leather chair behind the desk. He sinks low.

“I’m afraid of what they’ll do to my granddad.”

“Don’t worry about your granddad. He’s a pro. He’s currently hiding in our morning parlor.” He presses a button under the desk, and the framed photographs disappear to reveal a dozen screens of CCTV images. “Fourth one down, third one in.”

I move closer to the screens and find the room he’s talking about.

“I don’t see anything.”

“See? Told you he was a pro. That bookcase opens; a small, little room; hope he’s not claustrophobic. But he’ll be safe. They won’t find him in there.”

I look at the other screens and see mayhem. People have been lined up; others who rose up against the Whistleblowers are on the ground and have been wounded. Some are being marched out of the building and into vans outside. On one screen I see Alpha standing aside and giving a Whistleblower in charge a firm talking-to.

“Most of them won’t be charged with anything,” he says calmly. “It’s just to scare you all, break it up. And it worked.”

I nod, relieved that Granddad is okay but hoping he’ll be able to hold on until they’re gone.

“What about your tests?” I ask him, curious to know how he gets away with being in his state when he’s Flawed. “Won’t your Whistleblower find traces of alcohol?”

“Us geniuses always pass with flying colors, isn’t that so?” He smiles. “Mathematics is your thing, isn’t it?”

“I hope so.” I don’t know what my job possibilities will be now, now that I’m Flawed. I will never be allowed to rise to any position of power, most likely not as manager, and definitely never any higher.

“You hope.” He makes a face. “No, don’t use hope. Use your mathematics to get out of this so-called problem.”

I frown. He has definitely drunk too much. “I don’t think math can solve any of my problems now.”

“One of my favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein: ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’” He looks at me, eyes bright. The quote does more for him than it does for me obviously.

I shrug. “I guess.”

“You guess? Mathematicians don’t guess!” he says dramatically, sitting up. “They make an orderly list, they eliminate possibilities, they use direct reasoning. Never guess, my dear. Are you familiar with George Pólya?”