The final hurdle would be an interview with James Prescott, who would personally fly to Cleveland to meet them. Sara had heard of him; Thomas knew the name well. In the financial world, half seemed to think he was a genius, and the other half a sociopath. Oddly, nearly everyone who had actually met him was in the former camp. He was recognized globally as a master fund-raiser and negotiator.
Having earmarked Sara and Thomas’s application shortly after it had been submitted, Prescott had been pulling the strings behind the scenes all along, carefully orchestrating the logistics of the adoption. The couple was perfect, and they were obviously already sold. All he had to have them do now was sign the papers.
The negotiations, however, were far more intense than Prescott had envisioned, forcing him to book a last minute hotel room in Cleveland in order to meet for a second day. The actuarial tables and financial incentives did not impress the Ewings who wanted significantly more parental control. Prescott, on the other hand, wasn’t willing to consider giving away any more decision-making capacity than was outlined in the original agreement.
In the end, only one person was unwilling to back away from the negotiating table, and that was Sara. Once both men realized this, the conclusion was foregone.
In the spirit of compromise, and mindful of the need for a positive long-term relationship, Prescott conceded a few minor points that had to do with vacation time and giving Sara and Thomas durable power of attorney for healthcare.
Within a week, Ryan came home.
~~~
“We’ve got a few other minor issues to deal with here,” Prescott said casually. “His parents sent a permission slip for swimming – as legal guardian I signed off on that. And one for soccer, which starts in the fall. I declined to sign off on that...”
“What’s wrong with soccer?” one of the executives interrupted. “All my kids played it.”
“Repetitive head trauma,” J.R. chimed in.
“No!” another member of the board scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Seven-year-olds don’t get head trauma playing soccer!” Then he turned to Prescott, “Are you just saying no because you can?”
A lengthy pause followed the pointed question.
“Do you have a favorite wine?” Prescott asked contemplatively to no one in particular yet grabbing the attention of the entire board. He had pushed his chair back from the table and appeared to be staring off at some distant building in the skyline. “Mine’s pinot noir, specifically Burgundy. It’s a fickle grape – very hard to grow. Winemakers call it the headache grape – nothing to do with hangovers; it’s just very difficult to grow.”
He stood and began a slow waltz around the table, gradually looping back around toward the head, telling his story as he walked. “To make the perfect pinot noir you first need a great vine from great stock – and the clones from Burgundy are the best. But the best wine grapes don’t grow in ideal conditions. Far from it. They need some stress – struggles to overcome! The soils in Burgundy are ugly gravelly clay and limestone with no trace of the dark, fertile topsoil you’d see in a nursery. The weather can be harsh with freezing cold winters, frequent spring hail storms, and hot summers.
“But ahh, those grapes that do survive to harvest, they have
character.
Truly amazing,” he whispered, closing his eyes as if he were sipping the wine then and there. “Well, they’re full of potential anyway. But they aren’t ready. They need age. Perhaps no wine benefits more from age than Burgundy. Finally ten, twenty, even fifty years down the road, the end result can be mind-blowing.
“Gentlemen, we have a great vine from great stock, but if we put him in a nursery with fertilized topsoil, we’re sure to get very good grape juice. With some carefully managed adversity and patience, we’ll eventually have a world-class Burgundy.
“So to your question, am I saying no just because I can? You could say that.
“But the adoptive parents are the heart raising RTJ. We have to do what they can’t. We have to be the mind. Now, are we all agreed that soccer is out?”
Nine ayes.
~~~
It was time. Ryan had to talk to J.R.
Not only was J.R. Ryan’s only connection to his former life, he’d also really been nothing but good to Ryan. He was the only visitor Ryan had had for 3 months at the orphanage, and he seemed to have played some role in setting him up with Sara and Thomas, who Ryan had rather reluctantly come to realize were pretty great people.
He picked up the phone and hesitantly tapped “J.R.,” still his only contact aside from “Home,” “Sara,” and “Thomas.”
“Hello?” J.R. answered on the first ring.
“Mr. J.R.?” Ryan said nervously “it’s me, Ryan.”
“Hey buddy!” J.R. yelled, completely taken by surprise. “How are you? It’s been a long time.”
“Good,” Ryan said. “Sara and Thomas are nice. You were right about them.”
An awkward pause followed the reference to J.R.’s unexplained prescience in their last conversation. Ryan wasn’t ready to divulge that he now knew about AVEX and that J.R. was on his board of directors. And J.R., from his perspective, didn’t want Ryan to think of him as an insider – or anything other than a trusted family friend.
“Have you ever met them?” Ryan asked.
“No, I haven’t gotten a chance to,” J.R. said. “But the headmistress at the orphanage told me
all
about them. So what have you been up to?”
“Not much,” Ryan answered out of habit. “Well, actually that’s not really true any more. I’ve been doing a lot. My nanny’s teaching me Spanish, I’m taking swimming lessons, and I’m learning
fourth grade
math!”
“Awesome!” J.R. said enthusiastically.
“Yeah, things are a lot better,” Ryan said, relieved he still had J.R. to talk to. It was comforting – whatever his role was with Avillage.
“You looking forward to school this year?” J.R. asked.
“Yeah. I guess. But I’m not going to know anyone.”
“So what grade are you going to be in this year?”
“Second! You knew that!” Ryan exclaimed, unaware that his meeting with the school counselor that had been rescheduled from that afternoon to the following day was to finalize his grade placement.
“That’s what I thought,” J.R. answered defensively. “I just hadn’t heard yet.”
Hadn’t heard yet?
Ryan thought to himself. That’s a weird thing to say. Another awkward pause followed.
“Well buddy, it was
great
to talk to you. I’ve missed you. I’m gonna let you go. Let’s not make it so long till our next talk,” J.R. said, trying to wrap things up.
“OK,” Ryan said softly, now more certain than ever that his relationship with J.R. could never be what it had been. J.R. was hiding too much from him. Was he trying to protect him? Looking out for him behind the scenes? Hoping to profit from him? Ryan almost wanted to call him on it right then and there and live with the consequences – either an honest friendship or nothing – but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had another idea.
“And Mr. J.R.?” Ryan said.
“Yeah, buddy?”
“Thanks. For everything,” Ryan said with a sincerity and a finality in his voice that suggested this might be his last chance to say it. Whatever J.R.’s motives were, things were going better than he’d imagined they could have a few months ago; he wanted to thank him for that.
He then held the phone down slightly and yelled out, “What?... OK. Be right down.” He brought the phone back up to his ear and said, “I gotta go. Got soccer practice.”
“Soccer?!” J.R. blurted out, unnaturally alarmed.
“Talk to you soon,” Ryan said and hastily hung up the phone.
Sara and Thomas had been unable to give a coherent reason why he had been forbidden from playing soccer in the fall. And the idea to play in the first place had been all theirs. They were absolutely resolute with their decision, yet they seemed almost more disappointed than he was that he couldn’t play. Something hadn’t seemed right.
When the phone rang a few hours later, Ryan was indulging in the thirty minutes of TV he was allowed on weekdays. The caller ID popped up on the screen, “Private Caller: New York, NY.”
This is it,
he thought.
Adjusting the TV volume just slightly down so as not to draw attention, but to increase his chances of overhearing something, he crept out of the living room and tiptoed toward the cracked door of Thomas and Sara’s room.
Inside he could hear a voice that was clearly Sara’s, but the words were too soft to make out. As the conversation continued though, her tone changed, and her voice grew louder.
“What?” he heard her snap indignantly. “No!... What are you talking about?... He
should
be playing. He’s going to a new school where he isn’t going to know a soul, but you wouldn’t sign the permission slip, God knows why!”
He could have heard most of that from the couch.
It wasn’t the one he wanted, but, slinking back to the living room, he had his answer. At least Sara and Thomas were firmly on his side, but it seemed they were the only ones. And they didn’t appear to have much more power than he did.
CHAPTER 5
“Happy birthday to you,” Sara sang blissfully off-key as she backed into Ryan’s bedroom, balancing a breakfast tray in front of her loaded with a three-inch stack of pancakes planted with 5 flickering candles, a gravy boat of warm maple syrup and a tall glass of orange juice. Thomas followed closely behind, camera at the ready, and managed to rapid-fire several unflattering pictures of a bleary-eyed Ryan just waking from a sound sleep.
Ryan celebrated two birthdays each year. One, his traditional birthday, was in March to mark the day of his birth. The other was in June to commemorate the day he’d come home from the orphanage to live with the Ewings. For lack of established celebratory vocabulary to mark the occasion, they had settled on calling this one simply his “other birthday.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Ryan said groggily to Sara, eyeing the breakfast tray. “And thanks a lot, Dad,” He sneered at Thomas. “That’s gonna be a keeper.”
“No problem, bud,” Thomas smirked. “I tried to get your good side.”
Ryan blew out the candles, as his sleepy eyes were blinded by another flash from Thomas’s camera
“Now hurry up and get dressed,” Thomas said, trying not to laugh at the pictures he was scrolling through on his digital camera. “Our tee time’s in 45 minutes.”
Sara peered over Thomas’s shoulder. “You have
got
to put that one on the digital frame!” she snickered, as they turned to leave Ryan’s room.
Ryan sat up in his bed and ate his breakfast as he watched the pictures scroll on his bedside frame.
Joyful pictures of his early years with his birth parents gave way to somber pictures of a melancholy 7-year-old who seemed to have aged far more than the three months that had passed between his two homes. But gradually, as the photos continued to roll on, his smile returned.
His eighth birthday had been a family affair with Sara and Thomas and both sets of grandparents in attendance. That was followed by his first “other birthday” blowout that saw his entire extended family in attendance. Ryan’s beaming face fronted a sea of first and second degree relatives, arranged by height and age behind him, curling all the way up the grand staircase of the Ewing’s foyer.
As an eight-year-old, he was pictured smiling sheepishly in a Speedo with his swim team, taking his first golf lessons (with the board’s blessing,) and soaking up the sun with his parents on vacation in Mexico. At nine, he posed behind an oversized $35,000.00 check from the E.W. Scripps Company made out to Ryan Tyler Ewing, the youngest winner in National Spelling Bee history. He had been told the money would be going into a college fund, but he figured most of it was probably heading to the Avillage board. It hadn’t really bothered him; he had way more than most kids, and that wouldn’t be life-changing money for him anyway. What had bothered him deeply though was that he’d been forbidden from defending his title the following year, without explanation.
At age ten, a series of pictures marked his two months in Singapore as an exchange student at a Chinese-language immersion program at one of Hunting Valley Academy’s sister schools, followed by shots taken all over China on vacation with his family. He’d pleaded with his parents not to send him overseas by himself, and he’d overheard bits and pieces of their arguing with the board on his behalf, citing his understandable predisposition to separation anxiety. But the Avillage board had refused to budge. And it turned out he’d actually enjoyed himself once he’d gotten over there.
Age eleven saw a gradual shift toward more pictures with friends and fewer with his parents, although he did pose proudly next to his dad as co-champions of the Father-Son Invitational Golf Tournament at their country club.
After a single picture from his twelfth birthday party, a new picture he'd never seen before popped up in the frame, featuring a sheet of plain white paper with a hand-written message in pencil: "Check out your mom's purple shirt." He didn’t get it.
In the final shot before the loop restarted, he was lying on his stomach on top of his sheets, the back of his Cleveland Browns boxers prominently featured, craning his head up and back to squint perturbedly at his parents as they entered his room. His dad must have already wirelessly uploaded the photo from just a few minutes prior. Ryan couldn’t help but laugh. But that was
not
staying on the frame.
After finishing up his breakfast, he reached over and hit the sleep button on the frame, stood up to stretch, and then took a long nostalgic look around his room. The pirate bed had been replaced by a mundanely conventional queen-sized bed. The desk and chair were no longer kid-sized, the huge closet, stocked with far fewer clothes, seemed even bigger in its emptiness, and the color of the walls had changed. But for a brief moment he could see the room just as it had appeared that first day. The unique smell that every house has, which he’d become so accustomed to that he hadn’t noticed it in years, came back in a wave, and he sniffed it in with a long deep breath, gently closing his eyes as a lump began to develop in his throat.
He shook his head, embarrassed by his emotions, forced a half-smile, and headed for the shower.
Ryan still hadn’t told anyone what he knew about AVEX ticker symbol RTJ, which was now hidden in an alphabet soup of symbols representing former orphans on the half-full back page of the New York Times Business section.
Strict rules restricted the press from revealing the identities of publicly-traded minors, but it had dawned on him after watching his stock price rise five percent the day after he’d won the spelling bee that his identity was not an especially well-kept secret.
A week or so later, he’d convinced one of his friends at school to request a prospectus on each and every symbol on the exchange, to avoid having the material show up at his home address.
In his sparse free-time, usually after his parents were asleep, he’d begun to track down other orphans. Some were easy – like J’Quarius Jones. Others were harder. Some seemed downright impossible. One poor orphan he was never able to locate had been relegated to penny-stock status after her prospectus had revealed that she’d been diagnosed with “an aggressive hematologic malignancy.” Never having learned her identity, Ryan could almost feel her struggle as her stock price bounced around under ten cents a share for the next two months. His heart had sunk one morning when he noticed SUZ had dropped off the exchange altogether.
So far, he had a list of close to a hundred names matched with their probable symbols. None of them were in Cleveland, and he had yet to try contact any of them.
“Ready?” Thomas asked, as Ryan deposited the breakfast tray on the kitchen counter next to the sink.
“Time to go back-to-back!” Ryan said, looking forward to the defense of their father-son golf championship. “Bye, mom,” he yelled to the living room. Then he turned back to his dad with a perplexed expression, “She’s not wearing a purple shirt. What were you talking about?”
“Uh... I have no idea,” Thomas said, looking every bit as confused as Ryan.
“Yeah, right. Those pictures you uploaded this morning?”
“I don’t know anything about any pictures,” Thomas answered with a sarcastic grin, but still not fully clued in. He had only uploaded one picture.
“Whatever,” Ryan said rolling his eyes. He still didn’t get it.
~~~
Dillon Higley knew something terrible was about to happen when the power went out in the Boston townhouse he lived in with his dad. The mid-September weather was picture perfect, and their house was equipped not only with a backup generator, but a separately-housed backup to the backup generator. And his dad religiously checked the fuel status of each one twice a week, whether they had been in use or not.
Dillon crept over to the window and peeled back the lower corner of the curtains to see if the traffic lights were out. No. And the lights were still on at the bike shop across the street.
As his gaze shifted away from the bike shop, out of the corner of his eye, he just caught sight of an oblong black object about the size of a soup can hurtling toward him. A fraction of a second later the sound of glass shattering was followed by a heavy thud, as the black pill-shaped object struck the living room floor and began to spin, spitting out a thick cloud of caustic smoke.
Coughing, wheezing, tearing, Dillon pulled the collar of his shirt up over his nose and ran for the back of the house, yelling for his dad as he caromed off furniture and walls nearly blind, helplessly trying to blink away the irritants.
Just as he finally reached his dad’s bedroom, a battering ram punched through the back door, splintering the wood around the bronze door knob, which fell to the floor next to his feet.
Before he could get the door to his dad’s room open, he was snatched by a masked FBI agent in full assault gear and carted off to a field unit half a block away to have his eyes irrigated with sterile saline.
The next time he would see his father, they would be separated by an inch of plexiglass and fifteen years, minimum. His father would be convicted on every count brought against him, ranging from piracy in his early days to more recent (and far more serious) theft and distribution of classified United States government documents.
Aside from being a closeted anarchist, Horace Higley had actually been a pretty great parent. Dillon’s mother had left without so much as a goodbye to either of them when Dillon was six months old, so Horace was the only parent Dillon had ever known.
Horace genuinely loved his son, and he’d done everything he could to try to give him a reasonable,
almost
typical, childhood. He’d signed him up for soccer on his sixth birthday, since that seemed to be what other six-year-olds were doing. He’d even brought the post-game snacks and drinks once per season for the two seasons Dillon had stuck it out. But after wasting a dozen fall and spring Saturday afternoons sitting on the sidelines of the soccer field, Dillon on the bench, Horace in a lawn chair, they quietly bowed out, accepting the obvious fact that sports weren’t Dillon’s thing.
Next he tried music. But it took only two months of formal piano lessons and regular at-home practice on the small keyboard that Horace had bought him to convince Dillon, his father, and his piano teacher that music wasn’t where his talents lay either. It was really by exclusion, environment, and quite possibly genetics that Dillon ended up following his dad into computer programming.
Horace had tried his best to shelter Dillon from his more clandestine interests, but there were only two of them in the house, and they shared a rare gift for coaxing computer-based systems into giving them what they wanted. By the time Dillon was ten, Horace had unintentionally taught him most of what he knew, not only about programming but also hacking. Dillon had even occasionally proven himself useful with fresh perspectives on what had been persistent problems for his dad.
Horace had always tried to tone down his anti-government, anti-military, anti-corporate rhetoric in front of Dillon, who already saw him as overly bitter. Dillon was too young to be indoctrinated with such cynicism.
But that all changed when Dillon’s doting father was suddenly taken out of his life by federal agents, and, through a cruel irony, Dillon was placed in the state’s care. Horace confidently assured his son during one prison visit that an unassuming introvert with a laptop and no designs on recognition or fame could be a very powerful foe – even for the most powerful country on the planet.
An orphan at the age of 12, Dillon was blessed with patience – and a poker face. After a year under close surveillance, he dropped off the FBI’s watch list.
In the orphanage, he’d spent most of his time quietly and independently developing innocuous apps for smartphones and tablets. He was even making a little money at it.
Eventually, one caught the attention of a junior Avillage associate in the Orphan Identification Division.
His father’s criminal history had been dubbed a red flag by the higher-ups, but Horace’s testimony had convincingly absolved Dillon of any suspicion regarding knowledge of or involvement in any illegal activity. Plus he had a two-year track record of being an all-around good citizen at the orphanage. His age was another strike against him – nearly fourteen at the time of identification, but a set of prospective parents was already in the Avillage queue, seeking a technologically gifted teen, and the bigwigs at Avillage were sold on the risk/reward ratio of grooming the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison or Larry Page or Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg – the list of high-tech billionaires went on and on.
In the end, to heap insult onto Horace’s injury, Dillon was taken out of the state’s custody and adopted. By a corporation.
~~~
The defending champions walked confidently up to the 18th green needing a birdie to win the best-ball format tournament outright and avoid a playoff. A gallery of ten other father-son pairs trickled down the slope from the clubhouse patio to watch, debating which ball they’d play. Ryan’s lay just off the front of the green and would leave them a relatively straight fifteen foot uphill putt to the hole. Thomas’s shot was significantly closer, but would break down and to the right – a tough putt for righties.