Blinding Light Read Free

Ava’s case, on a deliberate self-assigned mission—and you discovered your traveling companions to be the very people you were hoping to flee, the ones you most disliked. In this case, young overequipped couples—rich, handsome, heedless, privileged, undeserving, and profoundly lazy in a special selfish way—from this generation of small-minded entrepreneurial emperors. And most of them were dressed in his clothes.
    â€œGod, how I loathe these people,” Ava whispered to Steadman.
    For one thing, they boasted of hating books and hardly read newspapers.
Trespassing
didn’t count, because it wasn’t new and was better known from movies and TV—Steadman was aware that some of the most obnoxious people seemed to love it for its lawlessness, its self-indulgent rule-breaking, and its tone of boisterous intrusion.
I've only read one real book in my life
—
yours,
such people wrote him. That alone was enough, but it was also an indication that you couldn’t tell them anything. They didn’t listen, they didn’t have to—they ran the whole world now.
You turned me into a world traveler.
    The thing was to shut them down as quickly as possible.
    Steadman had learned that, in an interview, if you fell silent and watched and waited instead of answering, people volunteered more detail. In this instance another man, a bystander, offered the detail.
    â€œIt’s quote-unquote adventure travel,” that man said.
    â€œEco-porn,” Ava said. “Eco-chic. Voyeurism must be such a wet dream for you.”
    That man winced, but the man named Hack said, “We’re traveling together. Didn’t you see our T-shirts?”
    He unbuttoned his khaki safari shirt, revealing the lettering on his T-shirt:
The Gang of Four.
    â€œUntil they finish the renovation on our house,” the second man was saying. “We’re reconfiguring the interior of a lovely old Victorian. We’ve got twelve thousand square feet. It’s on an acre in a lovely part of San Francisco. Sea Cliff? Robin Williams lives nearby, and so do Hack and Janey.”
    â€œMarshall Hackler—call me Hack,” said the big slouching man, inviting a handshake with his carelessly thrust out arm.
    And Janey was apparently the woman on the cell phone. She just flapped her fingers and turned away, but another woman who had been listening—she was pretty, bright-eyed, the one holding the paperback of
Trespassing,
in a bush vest and green trousers, dressed for a safari—smiled and said, “Ecuador. A year ago it was Rwanda. We were the last people in there before the Africans massacred the people on that tour. We had the same guide. He was almost killed. No one can go now. We were incredibly lucky.”
    The woman speaking on the cell phone broke off and said, “We’re whole-hoggers. We want it all.”
    â€œJaney’s doing the interior. But we’re reconfiguring the outside, too. Swales. Berms. I’ve got the footprint and the plans with me—still working out siting of the lap pool. Downstream we’ll be putting in a guesthouse and sort of meld it with the landscaping.”
    Hack put his arm around the man and said, “This guy actually wrote a book.”
    Dismissing this with a boastful smile, the man said, “For my sins,” then took a breath and added, “Anyway, I sold my company and got into hedge funds. This was—oh, gosh—before the NASDAQ tanked in—what? Last April?”
    Steadman leaned toward him, saying nothing, smiling his obscure smile at the self-conscious “oh, gosh.”
    â€œAnd I got in the high eight figures.”
    Hack said, “So he said to me, ‘Let’s get jiggy wid it.’ ’Cause he’s an A-player. He’s a well-known author, too.”
    At the mention of “high eight figures”—what was that, tens of millions, right?—Ava barked loudly, as though at an outrage,