The Paladin Prophecy

#63: THE BEST WAY TO LIE IS TO INCLUDE PART OF THE TRUTH.

“My parents wanted me to come here right away. As soon as I could. Today. Because they thought I was in danger.”

Rourke and Robbins exchanged a look of concern. Rourke leaned forward. “What sort of danger, Will?” he asked.

“They didn’t say exactly, sir. But there were people looking for me yesterday, in our neighborhood, that we’d never seen before.”

“Describe them for me.”

“I didn’t see them up close. Men in black cars, with unmarked license plates.”

“Do you have any idea who they were or what they wanted?”

“No, sir.”

“Was this before or after I saw you at your school?” asked Robbins.

“I saw them once before, briefly, but mostly after.”

“Did your parents contact the police?” asked Rourke.

“They did,” said Will, as close to making a lie of the truth as he could manage. “After I left for the airport. That was when I called you last night, Dr. Robbins.”

“So this was the reason for the urgency,” said Robbins. “Your parents felt these people represented some kind of threat to you.”

Will nodded. His throat felt too tight to speak. He poured more coffee and hoped they wouldn’t ask too many more questions.

“Have you spoken with your parents this morning?” asked Rourke.

“Not yet, sir.”

“You need to let them know you’ve arrived safely, Will. And I’m sure you’d like to know they’re safe as well.”

“I do. I would.”

“Do you have any idea what this could be about?” asked Robbins. “Or what their interest in you might be?”

“None at all,” said Will. Then he asked the question he’d had in mind all morning. “Do you?”

Rourke and Robbins looked at each other. He seemed to ask for her opinion. She shook her head.

“We don’t,” said Rourke. “What you’ve told us is more than troubling, Will. But we’re not without resources here. I’m more than willing to investigate the whole situation if you think that would be helpful.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’m truly sorry you’ve been through this. Hardly the ideal circumstances for your arrival. A new student’s first day should be a much happier occasion.”

“I’m happy to be here anyway,” said Will.

Right now—straight up—I’m happy to be anywhere.

“We’re happy to have you,” said Rourke. “First things first: You can use the phone in my office to call home. Follow me.”

Dr. Robbins stood as well, holding up Will’s paperwork. “I’m going to expedite this and get your admission finalized,” she said, heading to the office.

Will followed Rourke into a smaller office next door. Heavy leather couches bracketed wagon-wheel tables in front of another blazing fireplace. A substantial oak desk sat on a riser in front of a picture window. A bronze sculpture of a Native American warrior slumped on the back of his pony filled one corner, the work of a famous artist whose name Will couldn’t recall. Portraits faced each other on the walls, paintings of two tall imposing men, in clothes and settings from different eras.

“My predecessors,” said Rourke. “Thomas Greenwood, our founder and first headmaster, and Franklin Greenwood, his son.” Rourke pointed Will to a console phone on his desk. “Hit nine for an outside line, Will. I’ll give you some privacy.”

Rourke stepped out. Will wondered if anyone would monitor his call. They would at least have a record of any number he dialed and could check it against the ones he’d put on his application.

He weighed the risk of being caught in a lie against the chance that whoever answered at home might trace his call to the Center. He decided to place the call but spend no more than a minute on the line. He punched in his home number. The phone rang twice before a bland male voice he didn’t recognize answered. Will started the stopwatch on his iPhone.

“West residence,” said the voice.

“Jordan or Belinda West, please,” said Will, dropping his voice an octave.

“Who’s calling?”

“Who am I speaking with?” asked Will. “I’m a colleague of Mr. West’s.”

He didn’t sound like any colleague that Will recognized.

“Can I tell them who’s on the line?” said the man.

“Supervisor Mullins, Office of Family Services in Phoenix, Arizona,” said Will.

The man muffled the receiver, repeated that to someone in the room, and a moment later another hand took the phone.

“This is Belinda West.” Will felt the same sick ambivalence when he heard her voice. This was her, and yet it wasn’t.

“Mom, don’t say anything, just listen,” said Will in his own voice. “I’m all right, don’t worry. I’m in Phoenix—”

“They said Family Services. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“I’m fine. They’re helping me. Are you all right? Is everything okay there?”

“No, Will, we’re worried sick about you—”

“Who just answered the phone?”

She hesitated slightly. “Someone from your dad’s office is helping us—”

“What’s his name?”

“Carl Stenson. So are you coming home? Should we fly over there?”

“Let me talk to Dad.”

“He’s sleeping right now.”

That’s a lie. Will checked his iPhone: fifty-five seconds.

“I’m going to Mexico,” said Will. “Don’t come after me. Don’t try to find me. I’ll call in a couple of days.”

He hung up, then called the main switchboard for the science department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A receptionist answered.

“Hi, I work for the school newspaper,” said Will. “I’m trying to reach someone in your department. Carl Stenson. I think he works with Jordan West.” He pictured the receptionist scanning a list.

“I’m sorry, we don’t have anyone here by that name.”

“You’re absolutely sure about that?” asked Will.

“Yes. Would you care to leave word for Mr. West? He’s not in”—Will started to hang up—“but the police were here earlier and I know they’ve spoken with him.”

Will froze. “That’s what I’m calling about.”

“You mean the break-in last night?”

“That’s right,” said Will, going with it. “In Mr. West’s office?” He heard reluctance in her silence. “This can be off the record if you like.”

“All of Mr. West’s work was taken,” she said, lowering her voice. “Files and two computers. They’re going through everything now to see what else is missing.”

“Do they have any idea who did it?”

“Not so far. If you—”

Will hung up. Stealing Dad’s research, on the same night. It had to be the Black Caps. But why? Was that what this was all about? What could Dad have been working on that would justify all this?

Will pulled out a business card and, using the cell phone Nando had given him, tapped in the number.

He answered after the second ring: “This is Nando.”

“Nando, this is Will, you drove me to the airport last night?”

“Young fella, how you doin’? I was just thinking about you. You make it to Frisco okay?”

“Yeah, just wanted to let you know.”

“So how’s your pops feelin’?” Will heard a horn honk. Nando shouted something away from the phone in Spanish. “Sorry, bro, I’m working here.”

“He’s better, thanks. But I’m probably gonna be here for a while and we’ve got kind of an odd situation. Could you do me a small favor?”

“Absolutimento, whassup?”

“My dad’s worried somebody might try to break into our house,” said Will.

“Your house here in Ojai?”

“Yeah. I forgot to lock up and the doctor says he shouldn’t have any stress right now. Could you swing by and check so I can tell Dad everything’s okay?”

“I’m all over it. What’s the address, bro?”

Will told him.

“See you’re using that phone I gave you,” said Nando. “Untraceable is the way to go, bro. Gonna check this out and get back to you pronto.”

Will turned and saw Lillian Robbins in the doorway. He worried she’d overheard, but as she moved forward, he realized she was focused on something else.

“Got to go,” said Will. “Thanks, Mom. Check in with you later.” He pocketed the phone as Robbins reached him.

“I have to ask you about this before I bring it up with Mr. Rourke,” she said, concerned. “What you told me last night about the test in September. That you deliberately tried to fail. Is that really true, Will?”

“I didn’t try to fail, exactly. I just didn’t try to succeed.”

“But your score topped results across the board. How could that have happened if you weren’t trying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will, the bigger question it raises is, Why would you do a thing like that?”

She looked at him searchingly with genuine concern, so he told her the truth. “A rule my parents had.”

“What sort of rule?”

The words felt painful to say. He had never really questioned before why Dad put Rule #3 on his list. But now all bets were off.

“Don’t draw attention to myself,” said Will.

Robbins spoke carefully. “Why would your parents want people to think that you’re not as smart—exceptionally smart—as you actually are?”

“You’re a psychologist, right? That’s the kind of doctor you are.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then you tell me,” he said. “Because I don’t know.”

“They explicitly told you to hold yourself back, with no explanations?” she asked.

“All they ever said was, ‘We have our reasons.’ End of discussion.”

Dr. Robbins thought for a moment. “And then, after scoring off the charts, you discover you’re being followed.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe they had some genuine cause for concern,” she said.

“Maybe.” Will flashed on his plane ride from hell and thought, You don’t know the half of it.

“I can promise you you’re safe here,” said Robbins. “We have a lot of high-profile families and we take security very seriously.”

Before Will could respond, Stephen Rourke walked in and moved toward his desk, giving no indication that he noticed any tension between them.

“Did you reach your parents?” asked Rourke.

“I did, thanks,” said Will. “They’re okay and they were real glad to hear I got here safely.”

“That’s every parent’s job, Will: to worry about their kids. That never changes.”

Rourke referred to a notebook on his desk, jotted something on a pad, and then handed the note to Robbins. She read it without reaction as Rourke put a hand on Will’s shoulder and guided him to a door at the far end of his office.

“Now, Will, I need you to hear an abridged version of the Headmaster’s Address—the one I use at the start of every year to welcome our new students.”

Through the door they entered a long, narrow corridor sided with windows from floor to ceiling on either wall. Gusts of cold wind whistled through open windows along the top. The room extended straight out the back of Stone House, pointing west toward the campus, which he could see in the distance over the ridgeline.

“This was the final addition Thomas Greenwood made to Stone House,” said Rourke. “An observation deck that connects the house back to the Center. He wanted it to give a specific sensation to anyone who came here. That they’d feel suspended not just in space, but also in time. So he called this the Infinity Room.”

The floor shuddered with every step. Will shivered when he realized they were passing over thick windows embedded in the planks. He could see straight to the ground a hundred feet down; cars parked below looked like toys. There had to be struts connecting it to the rest of the building, but he couldn’t see any. The Infinity Room felt like it floated in midair. His balance wobbled like a top.

“Dr. Greenwood had the unorthodox idea that a visit here would serve as a crucial reminder to students,” said Rourke, “to remain alert at all times to the reality of the present. Because all we have is right now.”

Dad couldn’t have put it better himself. In fact, he did put it that way, exactly. Rule #6.

“Why?” asked Will.

“He believed experiences that create intense awareness tune the self to a higher consciousness, like a signal amplifier for the soul. And that one of the most effective ways to induce this state is the perception, as opposed to the reality, of danger. Your recent experiences might have given you a sense of this.”

Maybe that’s my problem. Danger put the zap on my brain.

Will’s eyes felt like they were revolving in their sockets. His palms swam in a clammy sweat. He didn’t understand it. Heights had never bothered him before, but this uncanny place made him want to drop to his hands and knees and crawl back out the way they’d come. He raised his head to avoid looking down. The corridor dead-ended ahead in a room filled with blinding light.

“That’s why Tom Greenwood founded the Center a hundred years ago: to introduce the future leaders of our country to each other, but more importantly to themselves. Or to quote him: ‘to their future selves.’ Think about that.”

Will nodded as if he understood—he didn’t, really—and moved robotically forward, feeling more brittle with every step. He realized the room at the end of the corridor was a circular observatory. Built around a large, elaborate brass telescope.

“The world’s always changing, Will. But now it’s accelerating at a rate almost beyond our ability to comprehend. Each generation faces bigger challenges and more responsibilities. If the human race expects to survive, we can’t just evolve with it. We have to evolve fast enough to stay ahead of that curve.”

They stopped at the end of the corridor. The observatory chamber opened ahead like a globe attached to the end of a stick. The walls, the ceiling, and the entire floor below the telescope were all fashioned from clear glass bricks.

Rourke walked onto the nearly invisible floor: “Are you with me so far, Will?”

Adrenaline pulsed in Will’s gut. Keeping his eyes on Rourke, he stepped inside. He felt like he was tumbling through open air. He reached the antique telescope and tried to anchor himself by focusing on its intricate workmanship. Anything to stop his head from snapping off at the stem.

“When you look around, wherever you might be on the planet, fifty percent of the people you see are below average. The rest are, for the most part, only slightly above average. I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with being average, because there isn’t. But as a mathematician, I can assure you these numbers don’t lie. Exceptional people are, by definition, exceptionally rare. We also know, from studying human history, that every innovation or adaptation that’s allowed us to leap forward as a species has been made by less than one-thousandth of one percent of the people alive in that moment.”

Will felt close to freaking out entirely, in a way that would make the worst impression on the one man whose goodwill right now he could least afford to lose. He leaned in and looked through the brass eyepiece. Expecting a dim view of the daylight sky, he couldn’t identify what appeared: Blurry globes and fuzzed-out splotches of color floated through his field of vision, like a slide of microbial life in a drop of water viewed through a microscope.

Then he realized: The telescope was trained on the commons in the middle of campus half a mile away. He was watching the magnified faces of students as if they were a few feet in front of him, moving in and out of focus like a kaleidoscope.

“And in this moment, because the stakes for survival keep edging higher, the need is greater than ever to identify and educate and prepare this tiny percentage within each generation who are capable of meeting our future challenges.”

He can’t be talking about me. This is some ridonkulus cosmic joke. I’m not up for saving the planet. I couldn’t even save my parents.

“So as you look around today … and try to imagine, Will, that you’re in our auditorium with the rest of the student body—”

“Okay.”

“All of these young men and women, like you, possess the talent and potential to become exceptional. Uncommon people who will one day do uncommon things. And if we do our jobs correctly, by the time you leave here for the wider world, you will be ready to realize that potential.”

For the briefest moment, Will caught a glimpse of his own face moving through the crowd. He adjusted the eyepiece, trying frantically to find “himself” again. Instead, a startling image seared his mind: Every face in the crowd was his. Will closed both eyes and held on.

“In the meantime, make new friends. Connect. Learn from each other, and for each other. Because one day, much sooner than you realize, this will become your world. Your generation’s time to put your hand on the wheel and navigate the way. But not yet. Until then, enjoy this part of your journey. Make friends with your hopes and dreams as well as with each other.”

The headmaster took out an old wooden pipe, filled it from a worn leather pouch, and lit it with a safety match that he struck on the telescope.

“Godspeed, go in peace and so on, and here concludes my opening address,” said Rourke as he puffed the bowl to life. “That wasn’t too terribly painful, was it?”

“No, sir.”

The sulfurous snap of the match and the savory, sweet smoke from Rourke’s tobacco filled the air. Will couldn’t catch his breath.

“I’m the third headmaster in our history. I’ve given that speech fifteen times. The same speech Tom Greenwood gave to the first assembly of his inaugural class almost a hundred years ago, and to the other forty-three classes he welcomed. As did his son Franklin, who succeeded him as headmaster for thirty-eight years.”

“Really,” said Will.

“I like to picture Dr. Greenwood in those early days. Standing out here alone on a warm summer night. Gazing at the stars, lost in dreams about this bold experiment he’d brought into the world. Right here, in the middle of the heartland, on the edge of the great North American plains. When our country itself was on the cusp of first realizing its own potential. What a perfect place to dream.”

What a perfect place to die, thought Will.

With that, he pitched forward, unconscious, and face-planted on the transparent floor.

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