The Age of Zeus

50. XANDER

"W here to start? I loved that boy. He was so beautiful as a baby, quite the most exquisite thing I'd ever laid eyes on. Sometimes, when he was asleep, I'd sneak into his nursery and just gaze at him lying there in his crib. Hardly moving, hardly even breathing, it seemed. So relaxed, so deep in the arms of Morpheus that he could almost have been dead. Alexander, my son. I'd never thought of myself as father material, but the moment he arrived I vowed I would look after him to the very best of my abilities, make sure he had the very best life imag-inable, and every night when I looked in on him sleeping I'd renew that vow. You don't have children, Sam."

"So?"

"It wasn't an accusation. I know you don't. I know everything about you. You were pregnant once, and you lost the baby, and for that you have my sincerest condolences."

"Kind of you. Go on."

"I think you will make an excellent mother, and I think one day, deo volente, you will be one. Let me tell you, the sense of duty that parenthood brings, it's indescribable. The burden of care which it places on you and which you willingly shoulder — you're quite transformed by it. It makes you try to become the kind of person you never thought you could be."

"Yeah, yeah. Having kids is wonderful, life-changing, et cetera. Everyone knows that."

"Let's not be snippy."

"I just don't see the relevance of any of this."

"I'm trying to show you that I am not a heartless and cruel man, although later on you may get the impression that I am. Please be assured that I never ever intended for Xander to despise me or for me to despise him in return. Of course I didn't. I gave that boy everything I could. Not just in material terms, though he lacked for nothing in that respect. I gave him as much of myself as I could, as much time and attention as I could spare.

"But it was hard, especially after Arianna died. With his mother gone, a crucial plank of stability was wrenched away from him, and instead of giving him the extra support he could have done with, I threw myself into my work in order to cope with my own loss, or run away from it. Work became my consolation and my displacement activity. I spent less and less time with Xander when I should have been spending more and more. I wasn't consciously neglecting him, I just found that I had to retreat into doing what I knew best, running Daedalus Industries, to save my own sanity.

"It didn't help that we were winning some huge contracts at the time, churning out mind-bogglingly vast amounts of product. Jolyon will bear me out on this. The company had gone into overdrive, and I couldn't simply leave underlings to deal with it all. That's never been my way. I'm a hands-on kind of employer, as you are well aware by now. I like to roll up my sleeves and get stuck in."

"It took you a while, though, here. To step up and become Cronus, I mean."

"I waited, in order to be sure. I had no desire to rush into anything."

"You wanted us to lay the groundwork first. To field-test the suits and iron out any kinks."

"Which you did, incomparably well. Shall I get back to my narrative?"

"Be my guest."

"Thank you so much. Now, I'm not making excuses for myself. I'm simply relating what happened. I never ignored Xander. I never shut him out. Every minute of free time I had, I devoted to him. But there wasn't a lot of it to devote. When you have manufacturing plants on three continents, a workforce of several thousand depending on you, innumerable suppliers to court and clients to schmooze, it consumes you. It leaves you with very little else.

"Xander never lacked for company as he was growing up. Our huge house was never empty. An army of staff, mostly female, tended to him day and night. His every minute, when he wasn't at school, was occupied with play, sports coaching, swimming, horse riding, music lessons, extra tuition. You name the extracurricular activity, Xander did it. But he was lucky if he saw me, his dad, for more than a few hours a week. I tried my utmost to be there for bedtime, to read him the stories I loved and I thought he loved, the classical tales of gods, heroes and monsters.

"But I only made it perhaps every other evening, if that. Visiting politicians from abroad do so like to be taken out to dinner, you know, and it's only polite to make videoconference calls with subcontractors in Asia when it's their daytime and our night. Xander was never alone. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was never left alone. The one person he really needed to be with, however, was hardly ever around."

"I feel sorry for him."

"You should. I do. Poor lad. My God, I loathed my own parents sometimes. Uptight, restrictive pair of cretins, they were. But I'd still rather have had them there than not. So many times I wished them dead, but equally I knew I would have been devastated to lose them. My mother smothered me, my father was a passive-aggressive bully. And then there was our rabbi, who seemed to be constantly around at our house, like a third parent. A pox on them all, but I wouldn't have done without them, even without Rabbi Rabinowitz, a kindly man in person but wrapped up in his Torah.

"And Xander had no one like that. No one he could rely on to the point where he was heartily sick of them. He had just me, absentee dad, whose chequebook was always open even if his appointments diary was not. And still he forgave me. Still he loved me. Small children do that. They have that capacity. They will love you boundlessly, unconditionally, whatever your faults and your shortcomings. And if you are good and attentive and you nurture their love, it will last. But if you aren't and you don't… don't…"

"Take your time."

"Thank you. This is pure self-pity. That's the only emotion that can still choke me up. I can go on now. Awkward moment over. Is this like one of your criminal interrogations, Sam? Am I like a suspect you need to crack?"

"I already cracked you, Mr Landesman. This, now, is just paperwork. Tying up the loose ends."

"Maybe I should ask for my lawyer."

"Only the guilty ask for their lawyers."

"Then I should definitely ask for my lawyer! Especially with 'bad cop' over there glowering at me. I hope we're not in for some of that police brutality one hears so much about."

"Just keep going, Mr Landesman."

"So, Xander continued to be my number one fan until he was about eight or nine, even if often he was adoring me down the phone or during a scant hour or two of together time that I could snatch on a Sunday afternoon."

"You'd even work on Sunday?"

"I was a driven man, Sam. Beyond workaholic. My job was me. I was my job. Forbes profiled me once. 'Captain Industrious' they called me in the headline, 'the hands-down most dedicated employer in the business world,' next to a ten-year-old publicity still that was the most up-to-date picture of me they could find. They weren't actually terribly flattering in the article itself, but that was mostly resentment because I kept refusing them an exclusive interview. I hate all that stuff, as you know. Always have, always will.

"But back to Xander. Our problems began — or rather, I began to be aware there were problems — when I started getting calls from his prep school headmaster. Xander was in trouble. Fighting other boys. Being disruptive in class. Stealing. He'd take money from the bursar's office. Break in, raid the petty cash tin, then trot off to the local village shop and splurge on sweets. I thought, 'Oh, this is harmless enough, it's a phase, it'll pass,' though I had a few stern talking-to's with him and pointed out to him that if he needed money as he had to do was ask. The Bank of Dad was never shut. Which, of course, was completely missing the point. Xander wasn't stealing because he needed money. He was stealing because he needed attention. My attention. It was the classic cry for help, and I in my stupidity and blinkeredness was completely blithe to it.

"Then he went to public school, and things just got worse. I sent him to Eton, naturally. What else do you do when you're filthy rich? The most expensive school in the land, where a year's fees set me back, oh, half a day's income, if that. Xander lasted four terms — 'halves,' I should say — before he was, ahem, invited to leave. After that it was a succession of schools — Harrow, Bedales, Charterhouse — working down the list until we were in the second division, and it was a miracle if Xander saw out a full term in any of them.

"And then even the second-division ones started refusing to take him, which is remarkable in that within the independent system there are usually no conditions of entry other than making sure the parental cheque doesn't bounce! But headmasters were talking to headmasters, and frankly Xander was getting such a bad reputation that nobody wanted him as a pupil. If it wasn't smoking, it was drinking, and if it wasn't drinking it was thieving, and if it wasn't thieving it was disruptive behaviour.

"One time, he stole a teacher's moped and rode it through the dining hall during lunch. Another time, he set fire to his desk in a history lesson — poured lighter fuel over it, struck a match, and chucked textbooks onto the flames to stoke them. He punched a French teacher who awarded him an F for a dictation — gave the man a lovely oeil au beurre noir — and nearly gassed an entire chemistry class by emptying a vat of sulphuric acid on the floor. Naturally I was able to soothe furrowed brows by offering handsome donations. I daresay there are several new science blocks and music faculties up and down the land that ought to have plaques on them bearing my name. And all the time, I was trying desperately to convince myself that Xander would grow out of it, that he was not a bad boy, beneath it all he was just hurt and misunderstood, he would come good eventually."

"And we all know how that turned out."

"Until you have children yourself, Sam, be slow to judge the parenting abilities of others. Xander ended up at an international academy in Geneva. His notoriety, thank heaven, hadn't extended beyond British shores. They took him in, and I braced myself for the inevitable explosion — and it never came. Something about the school, the environment, the Swiss climate, the polyglot peer group, I don't know what, seemed to have a calming influence on him. Maybe it was just being in a different country, putting some distance between him and all he was used to. It gave him perspective. That was what I thought, anyway.

"Xander knuckled down to his studies. He proved to have a great aptitude for the sciences, and in particular biology. He passed his International Baccalaureate in that subject with flying colours. I allowed myself a sigh of relief, letting out a long-held breath. The worst was over. We had weathered the storm. A place at Oxford beckoned for Xander. His future looked bright, and mine looked, well, certainly a little less vexing. I'd been right, I felt, to give him time, to let him work things out in his own way. My wait-and-see approach had paid off. This, as you might gather, was me justifying my own inaction to myself. I believed Xander cured of what was plaguing him…"

"Whereas in fact the problem had just gone deeper inside."

"Exactly! He'd figured out that acting up wasn't going to get him what he craved."

"Your full attention."

"Which equated to my love. He wanted me to show him I loved him, and to show it in ways that didn't involve shovelling cash at him, and he'd come to see that misbehaving only got him more of the latter and none of the former, so he adopted a different tactic. He decided to challenge me. I deduced this after the fact. If he couldn't get love from me to fill the void in his life, how about respect instead? He would make himself formidable, my rival, perhaps my better. He would become someone I couldn't fob off with money, someone I simply couldn't ignore. He resolved to excel in a single discipline and use it to compete with me and win. We had argued about many things, Xander and I."

"All those slamming doors."

"Yes. At first, as an adolescent, he would mouth off at me and I would scold him and we would row about that and also about how much or how little freedom he had, how I was trying to restrict him, how much he hated the schools I kept sending him to. Typical teenager stuff, really. All parents go through it. It's expected, de rigueur at a certain age. Adolescents stretch their wings, and their parents teach them the limitations of flight. But once all that was over the arguments turned ideological. Xander found that he didn't like what I did for a living. He thought it morally indefensible. Any number of times, I rehearsed the reasons why I have no problem with the arms trade — dirty job but someone's got to do it, and so forth. I also pointed out that my making weapons put food on our table and clothes on our backs. Would he rather we starve and go naked?

"But he wasn't having any of that. His riposte was that I was a clever man, I could have made my fortune in any of dozens of industries that didn't lead directly to murder, mayhem and maiming. Why arms? Why did death and devastation have to be my trade? And I would say to him that I personally did not pull the trigger or press the launch button, that was other people's doing. All I did was provide them with the means. It was their choice whether to use it or not."

"I bet that convinced him."

"You're right. It didn't. Not one jot. But I doubt any case I'd made would have. Xander had determined that I was in the wrong and that my career, my entire existence, was predicated on death. Worse, that I somehow relished death. That I was pleased to create the things that destroyed. He'd satisfied himself that the matter was that cut and dried, and nothing I said was going to shift him from this entrenched viewpoint. He simply dug himself more deeply into it as time went by.

"He was doing extraordinarily well at Oxford, flourishing there. His tutors, whom I made a point of being in personal contact with, reported astonishing progress. It seemed to them they had a budding genius on their hands, one of the biology greats, possibly a future Nobel winner. His discipline was terrific. He was attentive in his tutorials, thorough in his practical work, a regular habitue of the lab. In fact their only concern about him was that he seemed a little too devoted to his researches and experimentation, a little too fixated on work. They were worried that he lacked a social life. He was never at the pub or the JCR, he never attended 'ents' events at his college, he didn't do sports, he was the undergraduate least likely to be found parading around with a traffic cone on his head or dressing up in women's clothing as part of some rag week stunt or generally doing any of the oafish student things that so endear 'gown' to 'town.' He focused on work, nothing else. It was as if he had something to prove."

"And he did. To you."

"Indeed. By his final year at Oxford, Xander was specialising in pure genetics. That was his core interest. His obsession, one might say. He was using the facilities at the biology faculty to pursue various theoretical avenues that he kept his administrators mostly in the dark about. He'd tell them just enough to pique their interest and assuage their curiosity, the things they needed to hear in order to convince them to let him get on with it unmolested and unsupervised. He handled them cunningly. The budding genius got all the solo lab time he wanted and all the supplies and material he required, and not too many questions were asked.

"Which is why a senior professor had a hell of a shock one night when he walked in on Xander and found him in the process of trying to euthanase a lab rat. Not such a strange occurrence, you might think, only Xander wasn't attempting to put the creature down humanely by gassing it in a carbon dioxide chamber or injecting it with an overdose of barbiturates. He was chasing the thing round the room with a fire extinguisher, doing his best to club it to death with the base of the cylinder, and looking somewhat frantic about this too.

"Because the rat would not die. The rat took the fiercest blows he would deliver with that fire extinguisher and came up smiling. He was bashing it hard enough to crush every bone in its body, and all he got in return was an indignant squeak and a baring of fangs and a rodent that scurried away ever keener to escape the lab and its would-be executioner.

"Finally, still unaware of his professor staring incredulously from the doorway, Xander managed to imprison the rat under an upturned plastic sink bowl, which he then had to stand on to keep it in place while the captive rat hurled itself at the bowl's sides, desperately trying to break free. And almost succeeding. It had prodigious strength. It was able to shove the bowl along the floor even with Xander's full weight bearing down on top of it, nearly knocking him off-balance. The sides of the bowl were starting to bulge outwards, such was the force with which the rat rammed against them. It was only a matter of time before it burst through. This was not, the professor correctly intuited, any ordinary laboratory creature."

"Xander had done something to the rat."

"Very much so. The professor later confided to me that the animal's strength and resilience had been amplified tenfold, perhaps twentyfold. Xander had boosted its toughness at a cellular level, through manipulation of its DNA."

"Super Rat."

"Ha! Yes. Now, I'm a technology man myself. Engineering, physics, things that can be built from scratch out of manmade materials, things that are solid and fixable and that have predictable effects — these I understand. These are my metier. The organic world, nature, flora, fauna — simply not my sphere. Xander applied himself to biology precisely because of that, I'm sure. Because it was the antithesis of his father's forte.

"And so I can't give you chapter and verse on what Xander actually did to the rat. His professor barely could either, and he was supposedly one of the leading experts in that field of knowledge. Isolation of genes of interest, molecular cloning, transgenesis between unrelated species, prokaryotic vectors to aid transformation of the target organism, and a whole lot of other terminology was wheeled out by him to explain to me what Xander had achieved, or at any rate what the professor thought Xander must have achieved. He theorised that Xander had inserted genetic material from some other creature famed for its durability — he suggested a cockroach or an ocean-bed tubeworm — into the rat, in viral carrier form, and had used advanced restriction enzymes to facilitate the spread of the new genetic material through the rat's body. He'd managed to overcome one of the main obstacles to genetic transformation, rejection by the immune system.

"Though not completely. Not yet. All at once, the professor told me, the rat desisted in its efforts to batter through the sink bowl, let out a spine-tingling squeal of pain, and then went quiet. Moments later, blood came oozing out from beneath the bowl's rim. Xander tentatively stepped off, lifted the bowl, and peeked in. The rat was lying on its side, stone dead. The blood was gushing out from all its orifices. It was only then that Xander realised his professor was standing nearby and had borne witness to the whole escapade. A week later, Xander was sent down. The gates of the university were closed behind him. He was out on his ear."

"But that wasn't the end of it."

"Sam, it was barely even the beginning. Xander wasn't about to let a small thing like being turfed out of one of the most prestigious higher-education establishments in the world stand in his way. Not now that he had a goal in life: besting his old man.

"For several months he moped around the house, not doing much, brooding. I kept encouraging him to go out, have some fun, be with friends. What I failed to appreciate was that Xander had no friends. With all his shenanigans, moving from school to school, and then his intensive work habits at university, he'd not got round to making any. Least of all did he have a girlfriend, despite there not being any shortage of potential candidates. He was a handsome lad, and wealthy. Young ladies would throw themselves at him — and then bounce off, rebuffed by his indifference. His hair had started silvering prematurely, as mine did, but that didn't make him any less attractive. It lent him a distinguished, wiser-than-his-years air. But he did not capitalise on his many personal assets. He did not, as they say these days, 'get a life.' He refused to. He just stayed at home, and he was this awkward presence on the property, like a human thundercloud constantly hanging overhead and darkening the atmosphere.

"And still we would clash, he and I. A lot of the time we were civil to each other and you could almost have mistaken us for close acquaintances. Not friends, and definitely not father and son, but two people who shared a grudging mutual liking. Largely, though, we were at war. That ideological stuff again. Not simply about my line of work any more. Broader-ranging subjects. Politics. Religion. The state of the world. The ultimate fate of humankind. The big questions. Whatever stance I took on a topic, Xander would automatically take the opposite stance, regardless of whether he believed in it or not. After a while it didn't seem to matter to him if he was spouting nonsense, so long as the nonsense ran contrary to my opinion. The practice of opposing me became so ingrained, it turned into his reality, and he could no longer tell the difference between what he was pretending to think just to be antagonistic and what he genuinely thought.

"If, therefore, I said I thought the human race would survive, because our ingenuity and knowhow would enable to us to meet all the challenges thrown up by overpopulation, environmental degradation and the rest, Xander would flatly disagree, saying we were doomed. If I said, being something of an optimist, that I could foresee a time when liberal democracy would be universal, there would be a supreme governing world body and war would become a thing of the past, Xander would insist that history would continue on in its current, shambolic, violent way until eventually we wiped ourselves out. Almost in the same breath, however, he might add that some form of pan-national rule could be humankind's salvation. If someone powerful enough was in charge, if some strict global authority took control, then order could be maintained, problems curbed, and the future ensured."

"He wasn't above contradicting himself."

"Nor above espousing an orthodoxy that ought to have been abhorrent to someone with his heritage. My parents were refugees, you know. They quit Austria just before the Anschluss, in the nick of time. I reminded Xander of that fact often — how his grandparents had had to leave behind everything they knew, home, possessions, and quite a few of their loved ones, and seek sanctuary in this country, and then had had to watch helplessly as friends and relatives were rounded up and taken away by the Nazis, never to be heard from again. A powerful leadership of the kind he was advocating, running the world by force, was not simply morally repugnant, it was an insult to his own ancestry. His notion of saving the world by enslaving it was the one thing he said that truly irked me, the one thing guaranteed to make me lose my temper with him, and so it goes without saying that it was the viewpoint he voiced the most often and the most vehemently. He'd found a chink in my armour and kept stabbing his sword there."

"Was that what you had your final argument about? The one that led to Xander storming out and never coming back?"

"That? No. That was about money, of all things. Xander turned twenty-one, and at that point came in line to inherit a substantial trust fund which I had been building up for him. I, however, was not convinced he should have it, so I set about amending the terms of the trust so that it would remain under my custodianship for a further four years. By that time, I reckoned, Xander would have conquered his inner demons and be mature and responsible enough to handle being quite so rich.

"When he got wind of what I was trying to do, he went berserk. He threatened to sue me. He engaged the services of a firm of vicious Inner Temple Rottweilers and warned me that if I didn't let him have the money he would drag me through the High Court and make sure that the case was highly publicised, that every reader of every newspaper and lifestyle magazine in the land knew what a rotten father I was and how miserable I had made his life, how I callously plied my evil trade and how I laughed at the suffering my weapons brought to the world. This was no mere bluster, either, I had no doubt on that score. Xander would do it. He'd do it all, and worse. He'd expose me to the full glare of public scrutiny, and the consequences would be grim, both for me personally and for Daedalus.

"So I had no choice. No choice at all but to be blackmailed by my own son into handing over a small fortune in gilts, blue-chip stock and property."

"How much in total?"

"People are so fascinated with figures, aren't they?"

"Only the large ones."

"I'd estimate the fund was worth something in the region of one hundred million sterling."

"Phew."

"Enough, more than enough, to leave Xander in a very comfortable position for the remainder of his life. So what did he do with it? He only went and cashed in the lot, incurring, I might add, a hideous amount of capital gains tax along the way. And then, bank account groaning with readies, he disappeared. Just disappeared. For five years there was neither sight nor sound of him. I put out feelers, asked people who might know where he was if they'd seen him, even hired a private investigator for a while.

"But Xander was gone. He had vanished utterly. That much money can buy you a great deal of privacy and anonymity if you use it right. It can also buy you the time and the wherewithal to carry out further scientific research and to perfect certain methods you have already established."

"He was carrying on with his genetic manipulation experiments?"

"Clearly he was. At some undisclosed location — I suspect in South America, where laws are generally lax and lawmakers bribable, but possibly China — Xander got very busy. And made great strides. And the results are now in evidence for all to see."

"The Olympians."

"The Olympians. I imagine the non-human monsters were Xander's earliest successes, his prototypes and his first concrete results — splicing various different animal species together or super-enhancing existing ones. Once he'd made them work, and they didn't die as that rat had, similar hybridisation techniques with human subjects would be the next step."

"For example, the Minotaur."

"That malodorous beast over there, yes. It would have been a man once, as your instinct told you, Sam, until Xander got his hands on him. Who? Who was the person that now resides within that bull-like form? I've no idea. The same with all the other humanoid monsters, and with the Olympians themselves. Who used they to be, before? I do not know. Volunteers, one must assume, if not all then at least some of them. You'd have to ask Xander himself for the full answer.

"All I know is, at the Olympians' very first public appearance, when they gatecrashed that General Assembly session of the United Nations, I recognised Zeus and fathomed immediately what my son had been up to during those five wilderness years. It was obvious to me, too, what he intended to do thereafter, and sure enough the world was soon under the jackboot of the kind of powerful, authoritarian leadership he'd spoken of so often and with such relish.

"What's more, what was worse as far as I was concerned, was that Xander had dressed himself and his cronies in the guise of the Greek pantheon, from the weaponry right down to the ringleted hair and the peplos gowns. It was a personal insult, a direct slap in the face to me. 'Here,' he was telling me, 'these are the myths you love, Dad. Look what I've done with them. See how I've perverted them. See what I've turned them into.'

"I'm not ashamed to admit that it was when this sank in — the way my son was making a mockery of something dear to me — that I felt for the first time true loathing for him. That is not a thing a parent will do lightly, hate their own offspring. You can resent your kids, be exasperated by them, wish they were less spiteful, be driven to distraction by them, but beneath it all you keep on loving them. But not me, not any more.

"Now I hated Xander. I hated him beyond all compare. Beyond all enduring. It was agony to me that I hated him so much. It made me physically unwell. But there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't help myself. I wanted to wring the vile, contemptuous, ungrateful little wretch's neck. And that feeling only got worse as the Olympians began rampaging all over the earth, behaving far more intemperately and irresponsibly than their mythical exemplars ever did. Gods unfettered. Deities who treated humans with no more care or respect than we do ants. The Obliteration… I watched the reports of that with sickness in my heart, more so than anyone else, I'm sure. Not only was it unspeakably appalling, but to some extent I was to blame. I was to blame for that and for all of the Olympians' acts of bloodshed. Because the Olympians' ringleader, their progenitor, was my son. My own flesh and blood, who had spurned me, who had used money I'd given him to finance this grandiose exercise in super-powered fascism, and who was, as a happy by-product of his mission to 'save' the planet, rendering my business empire increasingly invalid and driving it almost to the brink of bankruptcy."

"So you decided to fight back."

"Absolutely I did."

"You couldn't just have tried to unmask him publicly instead? Gone on telly and told everyone the truth about the Olympians?"

"Would anyone have believed me? And might Xander simply not have had me silenced if I had? Besides, that was not my way. I knew what I must do. Where Xander had used biotechnology, I would use plain old technology. Where he had turned people into living weapons, I would give people weapons. Where he had enhanced them from the inside out, I would do it from the outside in. Whatever he had achieved, I would achieve too, in inverted form. I would take him on at his own game and I would win!"

"Which brings us to where we are now."

"In the throes of Titanomachy II. And not doing too badly so far, either. Tell me, Sam, what was it that made you finally twig? About Xander, I mean. Was it something I said? What about the mural? Did that have anything to do with it?"

"There is a whole fathers-and-son theme in evidence here, Mr Landesman. You and Xander, the mural — it's all there. But what actually made something click in my brain was Zeus quoting Sophocles on TV."

"Ah, Xander's classical education showing through. He did pay attention in some of his lessons other than biology."

"Not only was it a line about wishing not to be have been born — "

"A sly dig."

"— but it was from a play about Oedipus."

"A tragedy centring on a son who, among other things, murders his father."

"A veiled threat from Xander to his own father."

"Not so veiled, if you're the person being threatened and the threat is couched specifically for you alone to understand."

"Dez also noticed that you and Zeus talk alike."

"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, much though the tree might wish it otherwise."

"And the two of you are physically similar. The resemblance is there if you look for it. So it was a combination of all those things, but the Sophocles line was the key, the rope that lassoed them all together."

"Well, now that everything is out in the open and we've cleared the air, Sam, what next? What do you propose to do?"